Digital Health and Technological Promise

'This book is different from anything you have read about digital health before: Alan Petersen offers a novel, irreverent, and sobering take on digital health. Drawing upon debates from an impressively wide range of fields and disciplines, he teaches us to stop seeing technologies as the drivers of change, but instead to treat them as illustrations of political decisions that we have made, and of needs and inequities that we have ignored. In short, it tells the story of a political economy in which disruption has become a word of praise.' - Barbara Prainsack, Professor of Comparative Policy Analysis, Department of Political Science, University of Vienna, Austria 'Alan Petersen provides an impressive overview of current challenges at the intersection of health, data and digital technologies. The book urges its readers to move beyond techno-utopian promises typically endorsed by policymakers and warns against entering what Petersen likens to a Faustian bargain, where citizens surrender their most intimate data in exchange for access to technologies that serve purposes other than their health, well-being and privacy.' - Klaus Hoyer, Professor of Medical Science and Technology Studies, Institute of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, Denmark 'Petersen provides a nuanced sociological account of what digitalisation in its many guises might mean for the provision of healthcare. Resisting deterministic accounts from policy makers and those selling digital solutions, Petersen offers a way of understanding the present and the future that takes the past seriously. This book is important not only for those interested in digital health but for everyone concerned with the future of society in a world populated by people and digital technologies.' - Sally Wyatt, Professor of Digital Cultures in Development, Technology and Society Studies, Maastricht University, Netherlands 'In this insightful book Alan Petersen offers a timely sociological analysis of the dimensions and implications of digital health. His conclusion is telling - that digital health is unlikely to deliver much of what is promised - but he also highlights the potential for citizens to create alternative futures aimed at meeting human needs rather than techno-utopian visions. For anyone interested in this key development in medicine and health care this book is highly recommended.' - Jonathan Gabe, Professor of Sociology, Centre for Public Services and Policy, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK