On 17th September 2026, the world marked World Patient Safety Day under the theme “Safe care for non-communicable diseases,” accompanied by the call “Safe care for life!” It is an important theme because non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular conditions, cancer, diabetes and chronic respiratory diseases do not follow the logic of a single hospital visit. They require continuous care, repeated decisions, multiple providers and, often, years of interaction with the health system. WHO estimates that around one in every ten patients is harmed during healthcare, with approximately half of that harm considered preventable. The WHO Global Patient Safety Report 2024 also estimates that at least one in 20 patients experiences preventable medication-related harm, with 53% of such harm occurring at the ordering or prescribing stage.

Yet much of the conversation around patient safety remains focused on what happens within a clinical encounter. We think about the wrong medicine, a delayed diagnosis, an avoidable infection or an error in treatment. Those risks are real. But in the digital age, there is another safety problem that deserves greater attention: what happens between one healthcare decision and the next. A patient may receive safe care today yet face avoidable risk tomorrow when relevant medical history does not follow them.

A laboratory result may exist but not reach the clinician who needs it. A prescription may be changed in one facility while another provider continues working with outdated information. A referral may be issued but never completed. A patient may move between public and private providers, hospitals, laboratories and pharmacies, while the responsibility for connecting those encounters falls largely on the patient.

This is where I believe we need to rethink patient safety. For chronic diseases, safety is increasingly a question of continuity. The scale of the challenge is significant. WHO estimates that non-communicable diseases account for 74% of deaths globally, while cardiovascular diseases, cancers, chronic respiratory diseases and diabetes together account for the overwhelming majority of premature NCD deaths.

I would argue that one of the most consequential patient-safety gaps in modern healthcare lies between one decision and the next. Sometimes it is a series of small disconnects that nobody notices until they become consequential. Chronic disease management exposes patients to precisely this risk because the patient’s journey is longer than the institutional systems that support it. Healthcare organisations may each perform their individual roles effectively, yet the overall journey can remain fragmented.

This matters particularly in Africa, where healthcare journeys are rarely linear. The burden of NCDs is also becoming increasingly significant across the continent. WHO estimates that 1.6 million people between the ages of 30 and 70 die prematurely each year from one of the major NCDs in the African Region, accounting for 63% of all NCD-related deaths.  

A patient may begin treatment at a primary care facility, undertake tests elsewhere, seek specialised services at a referral hospital and purchase medicines from a private pharmacy. Insurance may finance some parts of that journey while the patient pays directly for others. The patient experiences this as one healthcare journey. The health system, however, often manages it as a collection of separate transactions.

That should make us pause.

Why are we still designing healthcare systems around institutions when illness is experienced by individuals?

Kenya’s growing digital health infrastructure offers an opportunity to address this challenge. The burden is substantial: according to WHO’s 2025 Kenya Annual Report, non-communicable diseases account for 41% of all annual deaths and 50% of hospital admissions nationally. At the same time, Kenya is building the infrastructure needed to support more connected care.

The Ministry of Health reported in 2025 that the Health Information Exchange was being developed to facilitate the sharing of patient information across facilities, while the Digital Health Act provides for shareable and portable personal health records and health-data portability. 

The direction towards shared and interoperable health information has the potential to improve continuity of care by allowing relevant clinical information to follow the patient rather than remain trapped within individual institutions. But we should be careful not to confuse digitisation with safety. A hospital can eliminate paper and remain fragmented. A patient can have multiple digital records that don’t communicate. Technology does not automatically solve fragmentation; poorly connected technology can digitise it.

The scale of digitisation is already considerable. In January 2025, Kenya’s Ministry of Health reported that its digital health programme included a Health Information Exchange, e-claims processing, the SHA Registration Portal and deployment of digital hospital management systems. The Ministry also reported that 91% of health facilities in Mombasa County had been digitised through the TaifaCare system at the time.

Interoperability, therefore, should no longer be treated merely as a technical ambition. It should increasingly be understood as patient-safety infrastructure.

This is one of the most important opportunities presented by digital health platforms. Properly designed connected systems can help healthcare professionals access relevant information, support better continuity, reduce unnecessary duplication and create a clearer view of the patient’s journey. But technology must be designed around the patient rather than around the transactions of the institutions using it.

The real value of digital transformation is therefore not simply its ability to collect information. It is its ability to improve the healthcare system’s capacity to notice.

Artificial intelligence and advanced analytics will become increasingly important in this regard. They can identify patterns, anomalies and emerging risks across volumes of information that would be difficult for individuals to analyse consistently. The real objective should be to help the right person notice the right thing early enough to make a difference. Technology should reduce cognitive burden, not add to it. It should help prioritise attention, not create digital noise disguised as intelligence.

Patient safety also requires us to reconsider what we mean by patient engagement. Giving someone access to an application is not automatically empowerment. There is an important difference between empowering patients and transferring institutional responsibilities to them. Digital platforms should enable patients to understand their treatment, access relevant information and participate meaningfully in decisions about their health. But the burden of making a fragmented system work should not be transferred to the patient under the language of empowerment.

WHO’s 2026 campaign explicitly emphasises that people living with non-communicable diseases should be partners in safe care and that risks must be addressed across the continuum of care, including homes and communities, not simply within hospitals. Africa already offers important lessons. In Kenya, patient navigation models in cancer care demonstrate that safety is also about helping patients successfully move through a complex healthcare journey.

A study of the Kenyatta National Hospital patient navigation programme involving 1,126 adults with cancer found that greater exposure to navigation was associated with improved understanding of diagnosis, treatment duration and required clinical services, while patients in the 2019 survey had lower odds of delaying the start or continuation of treatment. Technology, therefore, should not merely automate existing processes. It should make the patient’s journey more coherent.

At Smart Applications International, this is increasingly how we see the opportunity before the healthcare technology sector. The future is not simply about building more applications or generating more data. It is about creating safer, connected and patient-centred ecosystems in which information, institutions and decisions work together more effectively.

That requires a more demanding standard for innovation.

We should not ask only whether technology is faster. We should ask whether it reduces the risk of harm. We should not ask only whether a platform processes more transactions. We should ask whether it improves continuity. Systems will fail. Information will sometimes be incomplete. Networks will go down. Human beings will make mistakes. Algorithms will not always be correct. The question is whether the system makes those failures visible, recoverable and less harmful.

The conversation on safe care for non-communicable diseases should therefore move beyond the individual clinical encounter. The challenge before us is to make the entire healthcare journey safer. The safest healthcare system of the future may not be the one with the most sophisticated technology. It may be the one in which fewer critical things are lost between one decision and the next. Where medical history follows the patient. Where missed care is noticed before it becomes a crisis. Where technology helps healthcare professionals see connections they would otherwise miss. Where patients are active partners in their care without being expected to hold the entire system together.

That is the promise of patient safety in the digital age.

And perhaps the most important principle is also the simplest: the patient experiences one journey, even when healthcare is delivered by many institutions. Our responsibility is to ensure that the gaps between those institutions do not become gaps in safety.

The Author is the Group Managing Director, Smart Applications International Limited.