World Health Day: digitalisation for the benefit of patients and healthcare professionals
To mark World Health Day, celebrated on 7 April, we wish to highlight the vital role of digitalisation for the healthcare system’s progress.
Faced with increasingly complex care pathways and growing demands for efficiency, digital technology is emerging as a key driver, benefiting both patients and healthcare professionals.
For patients, digitalisation enables:
- easier access to information, allowing to better understand and monitor their care;
- better continuity of care, thanks to more efficient information sharing between professionals involved in their healthcare;
- a reduction of waiting times and error risks, thanks to more reliable data management.
For healthcare professionals, it offers:
- faster access to patient health data, thus promoting more effective coordination;
- a reduction in administrative tasks, allowing them to focus more on patient care;
- easier decision-making, thanks to more readily accessible data.
Digitalisation does not only foster increased efficiency, it also helps create a healthcare system that is more fluid and better focused on the needs of everyone involved.
Furthermore, digitalisation also contributes to the potential of the secondary use of anonymised health data, hence providing added value for research.
Given that digitalisation also facilitates collaboration between stakeholders and enhances data quality and security, it supports the theme of this 2026 edition: Together for health. Stand with science.
On this World Health Day, we reconfirm the importance of supporting this transformation to improve prevention and treatment, and to build a healthcare system that is not only more effective but also more humane.