DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE AS A MEANS OF ENSURING THE RESILIENCE AND CONTINUITY OF UKRAINE’S HEALTHCARE SYSTEM UNDER MARTIAL LAW

Abstract

The article aims to determine the administrative and legal significance of the digital infrastructure of Ukraine’s healthcare system as a means of ensuring its resilience and continuity under martial law and to substantiate requirements for its fault tolerance, recoverability, interoperability and security. Formal legal, systemic-structural, comparative legal and analytical methods are used. The empirical basis includes official data from the Ministry of Health of Ukraine, the World Health Organization (WHO) and Ukraine’s electronic health care system (eHealth), as well as relevant studies published in 2021–2026. The digital infrastructure of the healthcare system is proposed to be understood as a legally regulated and organizationally structured set of the central eHealth database, electronic medical information systems, registries, telemedicine services, electronic communications, cloud and backup resources, interoperability standards, cybersecurity safeguards and recovery procedures. It is established that during wartime digital tools perform service and partly compensatory functions by supporting access to medical information, electronic referrals and prescriptions, telemedicine interaction and patient routing. At the same time, continuity of the digital infrastructure depends on electricity, electronic communications, technical compatibility and cybersecurity. The study substantiates a shift from fragmented regulation of electronic services to a regulatory model for digital-infrastructure resilience. Minimum sectoral requirements are proposed for redundancy of components and data copies, alternative communication channels, limited-functionality modes, business-continuity and disaster-recovery plans, recovery-time and recovery-point objectives, regular testing and audits, and consideration of the NIS2 framework and the European Health Data Space.