Five themes for Digital Health Week 2026
Digital Health Week 2026 is organised around five themes drawn from the
Together, these themes focus attention on some of the conditions needed to make digital transformation work for people and support progress towards universal health coverage.
Activities can connect to one or more themes, regardless of when they take place during the week.
Click on the coloured tiles to learn more about each theme.
Leave no one behind
Digital health transformation can only support universal health coverage if everyone can benefit.
Yet access to connectivity, devices, information, and care remains uneven. Women, young people, people with disabilities, rural communities, and other marginalised groups often face the steepest barriers — and risk falling further behind as services move online.
This theme focuses on equity, inclusion, and people-centred design. It asks how services can be shaped with the communities that use them, respond to different needs and contexts, and reach those currently furthest from care.
Trusted and accountable governance
Rights and equity-based governance of health data and AI is needed so that people can trust how systems are built and used, and that there is accountability when they cause harm.
As artificial intelligence and data-driven tools become more embedded in care, decisions affecting people’s health are increasingly shaped by systems they cannot see or question. Strong laws, institutions, and oversight can protect privacy, security, and other rights while enabling countries to use these technologies responsibly.
This theme explores rights-based health data governance, the safeguards needed as automated tools enter clinical and public health decision-making, and the role of civil society and communities in shaping and monitoring the decisions that affect them.
Sustainable investment
Digital health needs aligned and coordinated investment that lasts beyond short funding cycles, not fragmented one-off projects.
When money arrives in short bursts and separate streams, countries are left with parallel systems that duplicate each other, tools that stop working once a grant ends, and little capacity to maintain what remains.
This theme looks at how governments, funders, and partners can pool and sequence their spending, anchor it in country-led plans, and back the running costs — people, maintenance, infrastructure — that keep systems working over time.
Country leadership and ownership
Countries must set the direction of their own digital transformation, with partners aligning behind national plans and priorities.
Governments hold the levers that make transformation stick: policy and strategy, regulation, coordination across ministries, and the mandate to hold delivery partners to account. Where external actors work around those structures rather than through them, countries inherit systems they did not choose and cannot sustain.
This theme explores the capacity, institutions, and accountability mechanisms that allow governments to steer digital transformation, and what genuine ownership requires of the partners working alongside them.
Digital public infrastructure
Interoperable, open and publicly governed digital foundations that health systems can build on and share across sectors.
When systems are built in isolation, records cannot follow people between facilities, data has to be re-entered by hand, and each new programme starts from scratch. Common building blocks — identity, registries, secure data exchange — let health services connect to one another and to the wider systems governments already run.
This theme explores the standards, architecture, and safeguards that make this possible, who controls these shared systems, and how they can be maintained and held to account in the public interest.
