On December 22, 2025, Israel’s Ministry of Health published a draft memorandum for a proposed National Health Registries Law (2025). The goal is to support data-driven health policy – including earlier detection of epidemics and morbidity trends, better prevention and treatment, and more efficient use of public health resources.
Under the draft, the Minister of Health could establish national health registries by order, for defined public-health and health-system management purposes. Each registry would be subject to a data-minimization approach (collecting only what is necessary) and would have an advisory committee that includes privacy expertise and patient-organization representation.
Medical institutions would be required to report data via secure electronic transmission. After receipt, demographic details could be checked and supplemented against government databases (subject to law), and then the data would be encrypted and direct identifiers deleted.
The memorandum also proposes a National Serum Bank, based on leftover blood samples from clinical care, to help assess population immunity levels against diseases.
The draft Schedule lists 11 registries, including trauma, bariatric surgery, respiratory pathogens, IVF, preterm infants, breast cancer screening, lung cancer screening, cardiac procedures, and stroke.
The scope and sensitivity of the data proposed to be collected may raise patient privacy concerns, particularly where registries extend beyond communicable-disease surveillance into more personal or intimate areas of health information.
For context, Israel’s proposal is notable as a single statutory framework focused on registries. In the EU, recent developments have emphasized EU-wide infrastructure and governance for access, sharing, and secondary use of health data through the European Health Data Space (EHDS), alongside stronger coordination for surveillance of serious cross-border health-threat. However, many condition-specific clinical registries remain organized at national level or led by professional bodies, In the US, nationwide data collection exists in specific areas (for example, cancer registries and assisted reproductive technology reporting), but many clinical quality registries are run through professional bodies rather than a single overarching registries law.
Public comments are open until 12 January 2026.
