This cartoon is actually quite a small sensation. Doctor and patient are no longer trapped in the classic division of roles “one knows everything, the other waits”, but are sitting together in the cockpit. Both are looking ahead, both have the instruments in view, both are helping steer. This is what modern MS management should look like: not as a solo flight by the doctor, and not as the patient’s self-experiment, but as a shared journey through decidedly changeable weather.

The image is wonderfully clear. Monitors, graphs, indicator lights, an MRI image, lab values: everything is there, neatly arranged, easy to survey, almost elegant. A real cockpit. And that is exactly where the joke lies: anyone who has ever seen how medical information circulates in the real healthcare system will immediately suspect that we are about as far from this as a fax machine is from a mission to Mars.

And yet, for multiple sclerosis, such a cockpit would make enormous sense. After all, this is not about a single number, nor about the simple question of “good” or “bad.” It is about disease course, symptoms, imaging, lab results, mobility, fatigue, treatment goals, side effects, and not least real life outside the clinic. In short: it is about a great deal of data, many decisions, and lots of small course corrections. Which is exactly what a cockpit is for.

Unfortunately, reality often looks less like avionics and more like a DIY kit. Some information sits in the physician’s letter, some in a portal such as the electronic patient record, almost everything arrives as a PDF, some still as a printout, and somewhere in the back of the system a fax machine keeps humming away, as if determined to prove that digitalization can also move backwards. Instead of a clear dashboard, what we often get is a kind of medical escape room: anyone trying to keep an overview has to collect clues, switch between systems, and hope that nothing important crash-lands somewhere between the incoming stamp and the filing cabinet.

What the cartoon shows, very cleverly, is that good care does not simply mean “more data.” Good care means that the right information is available at the right time and in a form that people can actually understand. A cockpit is not useful because as many little lights as possible are flashing. It is useful because it brings order to complexity. And that is exactly what healthcare still often lacks: not data, but structure. Not information, but overview. Not documents, but a solid basis for decisions.

And then there is perhaps the most important point of all: there are two people sitting in the cockpit. That is not a side note, but the central message. The patient is not a passenger in their own illness, but a co-pilot. The doctor, in turn, is not just a voice on the intercom, but an experienced navigator. Shared decision-making does not mean that someone nods politely at the end. It means that both are looking at the same information, understanding the same route, and agreeing together on the next steps.

How far away we still are from that becomes obvious every day. Cleanly prepared longitudinal data, standardized checklists, genuinely well-designed quality management, and meaningfully connected systems still require a great deal of imagination in many places. In aviation, no one would let an aircraft take off if instruments were missing, displays did not match, and the checklist had just been faxed over from another building. In healthcare, by contrast, this is often simply called everyday life.

Still, the cartoon is not a mockery of digitalization. It is more like a friendly reminder of what digitalization should finally begin to deliver. Not new screens for the sake of having screens. Not yet another additional system with its own password and three-and-a-half interface problems. But tools that create orientation. Tools that help doctor and patient better understand a complex disease course. Tools that turn many isolated pieces of information into one shared picture.

Perhaps that is the real punchline of the April motif: the MS cockpit is still a vision of the future, but at least the flight path is already clear. At the moment, digitally speaking, we are often still taxiing down the runway looking for the switch that enables data transfer. But the direction is right. Less fax fog, more overview. Fewer data silos, more collaboration. Less random navigation, more shared steering.

Or, to put it another way: the flight plan is ready. Now it would be nice if the healthcare system could slowly start providing the matching cockpit.