Valuing health technology: New value spaces for personal health systems to support active aging

Abstract

In this paper, we strive to unravel in how far current practices of Health Technology Assessment (HTA) are suitable to guide health policy decisions about personal health systems (PHS). We focus on the implicit representations of users and their position in the innovation process that underly established HTA practices, and explore in how far these representations are conducive to health technology decisions that support older people in meaningful and active lives. Our analysis builds on Callon’s recent distinction between prosthetic and habilitation social policies [M. Callon, Economic Markets and the Rise of Interactive Agencements: From Prosthetic Agencies to Habilitated Agencies, in: T. Pinch, R. Swedberg (Eds.), Living in a Material World: Economic Sociology Meets Science and Technology Studies, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2008, pp. 29-56]. We revisit the results of two case studies that we conducted in the fields of Point-of-Care Diagnostics, set in the domains of primary and secondary care, and care robot service platforms operating in domestic environments. By contrasting these cases we demonstrate how a different logic of addressing values in innovation feeds into either prosthetic or habilitation policy decisions about health technology. Based on this analysis, we argue that HTA practices in the context of PHS need to incorporate a logic of valuing health technology in order to fully deliver the potential of PHS to the lives of older persons.