AIF Insights No. 29 (2025) | From Sandboxes to Systems: Governing AI-Driven Digital Health Platforms for UHC in Cambodia
2025-09-12
Dr. Elias J. Engelking, MD, EMBA
Cambodia’s aspiration to achieve Universal Health Coverage (UHC) is inseparable from the country’s ongoing digital health transformation. As Digital Health Platforms (DHPs) begin to connect patients, providers and payors, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is emerging as a driver of both efficiency and innovation by streamlining administrative processes, strengthening diagnostics and enabling new forms of patient engagement. Yet technology alone cannot deliver on UHC. The decisive factors will be governance and ethics: whether Cambodia can create regulatory and ethical spaces that allow innovation to thrive while protecting trust, data and equity. Practical solutions such as regulatory sandboxes, soft-law frameworks and virtue-based ethical approaches provide a pathway for balancing experimentation with accountability. Building alliances between the regulators (Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Post and Telecoms amongst others), private health service providers and technology developers will be essential. This article argues that Cambodia’s next step is to align governance and ethics with implementation and issues a call to action for stakeholders to join ongoing activities and forums, such as the EuroCham Healthcare Forum 2025, to initiate collaborative regulatory sandboxes and long-term partnerships for digital health.
