Welcome to the 2026 MS Digital Calendar. You are holding a calendar that performs a small miracle: it is made of paper; yet, via a QR code, it takes you month by month straight into the digital world. A bit like healthcare itself: officially “arrived in the 21st century,” but in practice still occasionally in a committed relationship with the fax machine. And that is exactly why this theme fits so well.
Digitalization in healthcare often sounds like three things at once: hope, hype, and a hurdles race.
Especially in multiple sclerosis (MS), digitalization is not just a fashionable buzzword; at its best, it can offer real relief in everyday life, in care delivery, and in research. MS is dynamic and chronic: symptoms fluctuate, fatigue turns plans into suggestions, and “How are you doing?” cannot always be answered in two sentences. Digital tools can help precisely here: documenting symptoms in a structured way, making trends visible, supporting better shared decisions, strengthening rehabilitation and physical activity, and making communication easier. But only under one condition: the digital world must fit the person, not the other way around. Digitalization should never mean that, on top of MS, one has to major in “app management and account recovery.”
That is what this calendar is about: not technology for technology’s sake, but practical, everyday digitalization with humor (because otherwise one might only sigh) and with curiosity (because we are nowhere near the finish line). Phil Hube’s cartoons offer a lovingly ironic reality check: they show what already works, what sometimes gets stuck, and where the journey could lead.
The cover image captures the core message at a glance: reality versus wishful thinking. On the left, a stressed physician in the middle of an analog storm: towering stacks of paperwork, a ringing phone, a coffee in free fall, a sweat-soaked forehead and MRI images clutched in hand as if they had to be carried personally across the finish line. Everything is urgent at once; everything is loud at once. This is not a caricature of people, but of friction: good intentions colliding with too many detours.
On the right, the fantasy that has likely been quietly imagined in more than one break room: a South Seas beach, a deck chair, reflex hammer within reach and the entire clinic’s stress elegantly managed on an iPad. A scene like a postcard from the future: less chaos, more overview; fewer running back and forth, more control. Exaggerated, of course and precisely for that reason, accurate. It does not depict “laziness,” but the wish for a system that works without pushing everyone permanently to the edge of overload.
And so the question arises that will accompany this calendar year: Where are we really: somewhere between the paper pile and the iPad in the palm shade? Because digitalization in healthcare is not primarily a technology project; it is a cultural project. It is not measured by the number of apps, but by whether systems genuinely improve everyday work: whether they relieve rather than complicate, increase safety without sacrificing trust, create opportunities without building new barriers.
That is exactly where this calendar begins: as an invitation to look at reality with a wink and to make the dream so concrete that it becomes achievable, step by step.
