Digital Health Practices Research Articles

The environmentally impacts of digital health.

Digital health interventions are widely celebrated due to their low-cost nature and ability to provide tailored person-centred care in communities worldwide. As coronavirus disease-19 has rapidly accelerated their growth and reach, interest in global ethical questions surrounding digital health is growing. However, the global environmental implications of digital health have been overlooked. This commentary draws attention to the environmental impacts of digital health devices and communication networks, as well as the data produced by digital health activities. Unless serious attention is paid to greening digital health practices, the rise of digital health will significantly contribute to environmental change, and thus create outcomes of ill-health.

Success Factors of Demand-Driven Open Innovation as a Policy Instrument in the Case of the Healthcare Industry

According to the WHO Global Digital Health Strategy 2020–2024, we should advocate people-centred health systems, promote global collaboration and strengthen the governance of global digital health practices. All this requires a new open innovation approach, which means that stakeholders from regional administrations, hospitals, companies and intermediate organisations openly work together towards commonly identified global and regional digital health goals. Although both practice and theory have proven that the open innovation approach is beneficial for companies and end-users, there is still a need for increased understanding of what leads to the success of digital health related to regional competitiveness through the implementation of policies based on people-centred open innovation. This study is a longitudinal case study in which open innovation ecosystem partners (including challengers (healthcare organisation representatives), solvers (companies), funders (policy organisations) and supporters (intermediate organisations) were monitored and analysed in three countries. The focus of the paper is to explore a digital health open innovation ecosystem over the years. The results show that the created demand-driven open innovation model can be used to strengthen the governance of digital health, and to improve communication density and knowledge transfer between the ecosystem actors. The new model is a useful way to make funding structures clearer and to improve the people centricity of digital health solutions. The findings help policy-makers to use open innovation as a policy instrument supporting hospital and company managers to increase understanding of the opportunities of demand-driven open innovation.

Visibilities and the Analysis of Interdiscourse: The Case of Digital Health Practices

This contribution examines the study of interdiscourses in visual discourse analysis. An expanded theory of interdiscursivity considers the integration, plausibility, and popularization of meanings, offering a perspective on ways of legitimating interventions and instructions or guidelines for action. Based on the reconstruction of meaning assignments, the expanded interdiscourse theory presented here opens up the possibility of tracing how power is exercised through the occupation of particular discourse positions, whether these are of a linguistic or of a pictorial/visual nature. With reference to poststructuralist theories, assignments of meaning are seen as inherently temporary and unstable. Whatever social reality is, it remains at least partially ambiguous and is determined anew in conflicts or tensions surrounding hegemonic negotiations. Visual discourse analysis thus focuses on the precarious nature of hegemony-building processes. How such adjustments of meaning through visualizations can be investigated within the framework of interdiscursive analysis is discussed using the example of the digitalization of body data via wearables.

'This really takes it out of you!' The senses and emotions in digital health practices of the elderly.

Wearables, fitness apps and home-based monitoring technology designed to help manage chronic diseases are generally considered in terms of their effectiveness in saving costs and improving the health care system. This article looks, instead, at the digital health practices of persons older than 65 years; it considers their actual health practices, their senses and emotions. In a qualitative study 27 elderly persons were interviewed about their digital health practices and accompanied while using the devices. The findings show that digital technologies and ageing bodies are co-productive in performing specific modes of health and the ageing process. The study shows that digital technologies not only encourage the elderly to remain physically active and enable them to age in place, but also that the use of these technologies causes the elderly to develop negative emotions that stand in a charged relationship to ageing stereotypes. Thereby, the sense of seeing has been place in pole position, while the faculty for introspection declines. This means that age-related impaired vision can result in particularly severe consequences. In the discussion it is debated in which concrete ways that digital health technologies have had a negative impact. The sociotechnical practices associated with wearables conform to the primacy of preventing ageing; passive and active monitoring technologies appear as subsystems of risk estimation, which in turn regulates diverse practices. The conclusion highlights the interrelation between notions of successful ageing and the digital practices of the elderly.

How does health feel? Towards research on the affective atmospheres of digital health.

The concept of affective atmospheres has recently emerged in cultural geography to refer to the feelings that are generated by the interactions and movements of human and nonhuman actors in specific spaces and places. Affective atmospheres can have profound effects on the ways in which people think and feel about and sense the spaces they inhabit and through which they move and the other actors in those spaces. Thus far, very little research has adopted this concept to explore the ways in which digital health technologies are used. As part of seeking to redress this lacuna, in this essay I draw on previously published literature on affective atmospheres to demonstrate and explain the implications of this scholarship for future theoretical and empirical scholarship about digital health practices that pays attention to their affective and sensory elements. The article is structured into six parts. The first part outlines the concepts and research practices underpinning affective atmospheres scholarship. In the second part, I review some of the research that looks at place, space and mobilities in relation to affective atmospheres. In the third part I focus more specifically on the affective atmospheres of medical encounters, and then move on to digital technology use in the fourth part. I then address in the fifth part, some relevant scholarship on digital health technologies. I end the essay with some reflections of directions in which future research taking up the concept of affective atmospheres in the context of digital health technologies can go. The key research question that these topics all work towards is that asking ‘How does digital health feel?’

The Big Data Revolution: Opportunities for Chief Nurse Executives

Informatics competency adoption is a recognized issue across nursing roles in digital health practice settings. Further, it has been suggested that the health system's inability to reap the promised benefits of electronic health/patient records is, in part, a manifestation of inadequate development of informatics competency by chief nurse executives (CNEs) and other clinicians (Amendola 2008; Simpson 2013). This paper will focus on CNE informatics competency and nursing knowledge development as it pertains to the Big Data revolution. With the paper's aim of showing how CNEs armed with informatics competency can harness the full potential of Big Data offering new opportunities for nursing knowledge development in their clinical transformation roles as eHealth project sponsors. It is proposed that informatics-savvy CNEs are the new transformational leaders of the digital age who will have the advantage to successfully advocate for nurses in leading 21st-century health systems. Also, transformational CNEs armed with informatics competency will position nurses and the nursing profession to achieve its future vision, where nurses are perceived by patients and professionals alike as knowledge workers, providing the leadership essential for safe, quality care and demonstrating nursing's unique contributions to fiscal health through clinically relevant, evidence-based practices (McBride 2005b).