Europe is working towards a future where patients can access and authorise the secure sharing of health information across borders. For healthcare professionals, that future brings new opportunities - and new responsibilities.
Imagine you become ill while travelling, studying or working in another European country. The clinician treating you needs information about your medication, allergies or recent care, but your records are held in a health system hundreds of kilometres away.
For many patients, this is still a familiar problem. Healthcare may be increasingly digital, but digital information does not automatically move smoothly between organisations or countries. Europe is now trying to change that.
In July 2026, the European Commission's DIGIT team and the myHealth@myHands consortium reported progress on a model designed to connect the European Digital Identity Wallet with the MyHealth@EU infrastructure and the wider European Health Data Space. The aim is to support secure, citizen-controlled access to electronic health information across borders.
The future of digital healthcare is not only about creating more data. It is about helping the right people access the right information, securely, when it is needed.
What could cross-border digital health look like?
The model being explored is designed around patient control. In practical terms, it could allow citizens to access their own electronic health information and explicitly authorise a healthcare professional in another participating country to view relevant data. It also points towards patients being able to monitor use of their information, request corrections, download records and add information themselves.
This is closely linked to the European Health Data Space, which is intended to create a common framework for the secure exchange and use of electronic health data across the EU. The broader ambition is continuity: healthcare information should be more useful to citizens wherever care takes place, rather than remaining locked inside separate systems.
Digital records change the professional role too
It is easy to describe this as an infrastructure or IT project, but interoperable health data changes everyday clinical work as well.
Healthcare professionals increasingly need to know how to interpret information that may have been recorded elsewhere, understand what a patient has authorised, protect confidentiality and make decisions using information from different systems. They may also need to explain digital processes to patients who have different levels of confidence, literacy or trust.
A record being available does not automatically make it clinically useful. Professionals still have to understand context. Data may be incomplete, differently structured or recorded according to another organisation's practices. Digital access can support better continuity of care, but judgement remains essential.
Patient control brings communication to the forefront
The direction of travel in Europe also gives patients a more active role in how health information is accessed and shared. That is an important shift. Digital health is not simply something that happens behind the scenes between institutions; increasingly, patients themselves are part of the information flow.
This creates a need for clearer communication. A patient may want to know why a professional needs access to a particular record, what information is being shared, how it is protected and what happens next. Professionals need to be able to answer those questions in plain language.
Trust will be central. People are more likely to engage with digital health systems if they understand the benefits and feel that they remain in control. That means technical safeguards and human communication have to work together.
What should students be learning now?
If cross-border electronic health information becomes increasingly normal, healthcare education needs to prepare students for more than navigating one local electronic record system.
Students need broader digital health competence: understanding interoperability, privacy, consent, data quality, digital identity and safe information sharing. They also need to see how these issues connect with clinical decisions and patient relationships.
A useful learning activity might not ask students simply to locate information in a record. It might ask them to decide what information is relevant, identify what should not be shared, explain the process to a patient and respond when digital information conflicts with what the patient tells them.
What this means for Hybrid Healthcare
Hybrid Healthcare focuses on the combination of technology and management skills needed in modern care. Cross-border digital health shows why both sides matter. Infrastructure can make information available, but people still have to manage access, interpret data, communicate with patients and coordinate care across organisational boundaries.
The healthcare professional of the future will work in an environment where records, consultations and decisions may cross physical and digital boundaries. Preparing for that environment begins in education - by giving students and educators opportunities to understand not only what digital systems can do, but how to use them responsibly and effectively.