He said the World Bank estimates the funding gap at close to $200 billion, which is required to build basic but resilient healthcare systems that can respond to risks such as climate change and future pandemics.
“We are nowhere close to that,” he said, referring to current funding levels.Bishen said the WEF is working with the private sector to help bridge part of the gap, with a focus on digital health initiatives. He added that healthcare spending has risen to about $10–12 trillion globally, or at least 10% of world GDP, and is growing much faster than economic output.
According to Bishen, around 20–25% of this spending is wasted due to misdiagnosis, overuse of tests and medicines, hospital inefficiencies, and administrative costs.
“AI can help reduce that wastage in the health system,” he said.
Also Read | $600 billion investment in AI marks ‘fastest large scale capital reallocation in modern history’: WEF’s Cathy Li
He said digital tools, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, could improve efficiency and help control costs, even as governments struggle to increase public funding for healthcare.
These are edited excerpts of the interview.
Q: It’s been a challenging year, largely on account of the fact that we’ve seen the US retreat from many of the multilateral organisations, including, of course, the ones that deal with healthcare and healthcare outcomes. What impact have you seen from that so far?
A: The overall global health system is under a lot of pressure because of the funding situation. As you mentioned, we are seeing some retreat in terms of the overall systems, the health system work that we were doing, the work that we were doing on the resilience side, together with both the public and private sector, together with the World Health Organisation (WHO).
We do see an impact from the shortfall, in fact, in funding on that, so it’s been a challenge. What the WEF is doing is trying to see how we can fill some of that funding gap, funding the budget that’s needed to build a strong, resilient health system, to fill some of that gap.
Q: What is the estimated gap at this point in time?
A: If you look at the World Bank, the estimate is somewhere close to $200 billion, which is the shortfall. That’s the gap. So, you need about that, that much money to build a reasonable, not the best, but a reasonable, healthcare system around the world that’s resilient and that can respond to some of the challenges that we face, whether it’s climate change or it’s a pandemic. So, we are nowhere close to that. This is what we are trying to work on with the private sector to see if we can do some of the things that we were planning to do, still move on, especially in the digital health area.
Because, obviously, money is never enough. You always need more and more money to put behind special programmes, especially on the health side. But one of the things that we are trying to do, and we talked about this last year, is on the digital side. So how can we use digital technologies, especially AI and machine learning, to overall improve healthcare efficiency?
Also Read | Davos 2026: Geoeconomic tensions top business risk for 2026, says WEF’s Saadia Zahidi
The healthcare cost is ballooning on an annual basis. We are at about $10 to $12 trillion, depending on whose estimate you are looking at, but it’s at least 10% of the global gross domestic product (GDP), and it’s increasing at a rate of three times faster than GDP.
There’s no way that we can fill that gap just by funding from the public sector. There is no way that we can come up with that kind of growth from other sectors to match the demand that the healthcare expenditure requires.
What we are trying to do is to see how we can use digital technologies, how we can use digital health to control some of the cost, bring in better efficiencies.
Right now, if you look at the $10 to $12 trillion that I mentioned, about 20 to 25% of that is waste. That’s preventable cost that’s coming because of misdiagnosis, overuse of diagnostic methods, overuse of prescriptions, overuse of hospitals and other things, and inefficiencies in the administration side.
AI can help quite a bit in that area. It can reduce that wastage in the health system. So, 20 to 25% adds up to almost $2.5 trillion on an annual basis. So, we are working on how we can use health data, how we can use AI to reduce that. So, we believe that overall digital health can help in both of these areas.
For the full interview, watch the accompanying video
