Professor Wang Haibo, director of the Research Centre of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in Medicine under the First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, told the Post that the health data system in the city’s public sector was something he had not seen in the United States or Europe.

“Hong Kong has the best opportunity to develop the most sophisticated AI system for medicine in the world,” Wang said on the sidelines of the Asia Summit on Global Health last month.

“The system is the only single technical platform system that harbours generations of the Hong Kong people’s population data and medical data,” he said, referring to the clinical management system used by the city’s 43 public hospitals.

The Hospital Authority started to develop the system in the 1990s, and as of last year, it contained at least 11 million patient records.

Wang, who worked at the University of Hong Kong for about a decade and studied at Harvard University and the University of Maryland in the US, said he had not seen a healthcare data system similar to the Hong Kong one in the North American country or Europe.