De Gruyter Handbook of Digital Health and Society

The De Gruyter Handbook of Digital Health and Society explores how digitalization is reconfiguring practices of health and medicine. Digitalisation requires health and medical practices to address and utilise the interrelated challenges posed by increased quantification (e.g., data-intensive medicine), ubiquitous connectivity (e.g., remote access to care providers), and the unprecedented power of algorithms (e.g., communicative AI). Developing important social scientific analyses of the contemporary sociotechnical configuration of health knowledge, therapeutic relationships and medical decision-making, the handbook puts forward theories and methods to inform the development, implementation and governance of Digital Health. It will therefore be an invaluable resource for shaping desirable futures in health and care.

• The first handbook of digital health and society
• Contributions by leading scholars in the field
• A much-needed thematic framework for future teaching and research
• Discusses new perspectives towards the responsible governance of digital health

Benjamin Marent is an Associate Professor in Digital Technology at the University of Sussex, UK. With a background in medical sociology and science and technology studies, his research investigates and informs the digital transformation of healthcare, with a current focus on telemedicine and the application of conversational artificial intelligence (AI).

"Researchers and students grappling with the digitalisation of health should keep this Handbook close by, on a shelf or in a digital library, to inform, explain, and provoke their thinking. It offers deep, critical, and much-needed social science perspectives that will enrich understanding and exploration of the complex, mutual shaping of society, social practices and digital heath technologies."

Catherine Pope, Professor of Medical Sociology and Co-Lead of the MSc Applied Digital Health, Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford, UK.

"This Handbook offers a timely, incisive account of how digital technologies are reshaping health and care—and how the social sciences are crucial to making sense of these transformations. By drawing together leading scholars from sociology, STS, media studies, philosophy, and political science, the volume brings conceptual clarity and empirical depth to our collective understanding of the fast-moving field of digital health. It is an essential reference work for researchers and practitioners seeking guidance on investigating and engaging in the reconfigurations of health and care in digital societies."

Martyn Pickersgill, Professor of the Sociology of Science and Medicine and Co-Director of the Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society, Usher Institute, The University of Edinburgh, UK.