Читать книгу Digital Health Communications - Группа авторов - Страница 14

While we do not wish to further evoke here the multiplicity of empirical approaches practiced in digital communication, it seems to us necessary to mention the main currents of communicational thinking in health. We believe that all of them are defined by a critical distance towards supporting discourses or organizational projects that aim to make ICTs the all-encompassing solutions to most, if not all, of the health sector problems. This critical distance, the result of observations made as closely as possible to the uses and info-communication practices of patients and caregivers, never precludes an increase in generality involving a systemic questioning of the dominant neoliberal perspectives.

It is in this perspective that Dominique Carré and Jean-Guy Lacroix, in a Franco-Quebec approach that is very similar to ours today, aimed to understand in a general and global way the societal stakes of the computerization of care. Not exclusively focused on organizational issues, their approaches jointly see the beginnings of a mutation of expertise and a technician ideology promoting the empowerment of a patient who is supposed to become an actor of his or her care… online. It is then a question of evaluating the effects of the “computer transplant” [CAR 01b] in a constantly changing health sector, between renewed regulations, major industrial and economic stakes and the imposition of new rationalizing managerial standards. The objective of the two authors is clear: to show the role of communicating information technology in the dual process of merchandizing and managerialization underlying the “outpatient shift”; the latter aiming to reduce the overall costs of hospital care considered too expensive.

The research conducted or highlighted by Carré and Lacroix questions the promotion of sociotechnical empowerment aimed at encouraging patients to co-produce the care they receive by automating part of the medical follow-up [CAR 01a]. They prefigure all or part of the work that we now refer to as “digital communication in health”. Since then, these perspectives have not only been largely updated, but also constitute a particularly lively research subject within the ICS. As a result of the pioneering approach of these two authors, health studies will attract the interest of a growing number of ICS researchers, providing empirical support for the major theoretical currents in our discipline. This work repeatedly questions the issues of the digitalization of today; the field of healthcare is a central terrain for exploring the developments of the digital society. We propose a synthetic panorama of this field in the following sections.