The Polish healthcare system no longer faces a problem of a lack of digital services; the problem is that the information stored in various systems still does not form a single, usable patient record.
The scale of digitalisation is significant. The Online Patient Account is already used by 21 million people. In Poland, over 3.15 billion e-prescriptions and 344 million e-referrals have been issued. The P1 system has become the core infrastructure of the healthcare system, but the e-Health Centre itself continues to identify electronic health records and their exchange as one of the greatest challenges in the sector’s digitalisation.
The same problem is evident across Europe. According to a European Commission study from June 2026, the average level of maturity regarding citizens’ access to electronic health records in the EU already stands at 87 per cent. The figure looks good until it is broken down by specific types of data. E-prescriptions stand at 89 per cent, but medical images at just 35 per cent, and information on medical devices and implants at 59 per cent. Public healthcare providers are connected to the data-sharing infrastructure at a rate of 85 per cent, whilst private providers stand at 66 per cent.
This highlights the crux of the problem. A digital document is not necessarily interoperable data. A prescription can be transferred without issue between a doctor’s surgery and a pharmacy, whilst a CT scan result, a test report or a hospital discharge summary remain within the system of a specific healthcare facility. The next doctor then receives not the full medical history, but only a fragment of it.
The cost of such fragmentation is very real. Repeated tests, manual transfer of information, sending documents as PDFs, separate integrations between systems and the time spent searching for data all increase the operational costs of healthcare facilities. CeZ itself points out that wider access to historical data is intended to reduce the duplication of diagnostic tests and facilitate the continuation of treatment by subsequent doctors.
The OECD highlights an even broader problem. Data fragmentation reduces the system’s efficiency, hinders continuity of care and limits the use of analytics and artificial intelligence. This is particularly important today, as hospitals and technology firms invest in models that support diagnostics, the analysis of medical records and risk prediction. An algorithm cannot solve the problem of data it has not received or whose meaning varies between systems.
The EHDS is changing the rules of the market
The European Health Data Space (EHDS) is set to gradually change this landscape. The Regulation came into force on 26 March 2025. By March 2027, the Commission is due to adopt key implementing provisions. By 2029, the exchange of patient records, e-prescriptions and information on their dispensing should be operational in all EU Member States. By 2031, the system will also cover medical images, laboratory test results and hospital discharge summaries.
The biggest change, however, may occur in the IT market. Electronic health record systems will have to incorporate harmonised mechanisms for interoperability and access logging. It must be possible to import and export data in the European medical records exchange format, and the software must not technically restrict authorised access, sharing or export of information. Manufacturers will also test the compatibility of these components before the system is launched on the market.
In practice, this challenges one of the long-standing mechanisms of the medical IT market: the high cost of switching suppliers. The European Commission explicitly states that interoperability is intended to reduce vendor lock-in and facilitate the replacement or modernisation of EHR systems. For manufacturers, this means less protection stemming from a closed ecosystem, but at the same time easier entry into other EU countries’ markets thanks to common requirements.
Consequently, the economics of technology procurement in healthcare are also changing. The number of functions within a system remains important, but the ability to transfer data, link it to other sources and use it outside a single manufacturer’s environment is becoming increasingly valuable. Integration is no longer an additional project carried out after implementation, but is becoming a feature of the product itself.
At the same time, the EHDS does not eliminate the most difficult part of the problem: data quality. By March 2027, the Commission is to set out requirements concerning, amongst other things, the semantics, uniformity, consistency, accuracy and completeness of information recorded in EHR systems.
Europe already has millions of digital health records, prescriptions, test results and applications. The next stage is not about generating more data, but about ensuring that it can be used outside the system in which it was created. Only then will the digitalisation of healthcare begin to translate into productivity, competition in the IT market and the real-world scale of AI applications.
