Towards a Digital Health Ecology at the NHS: Healthcare Technology Adoption through the COVID-19 Looking Glass

Towards a Digital Health Ecology at the NHS: Healthcare Technology  Adoption through the COVID-19 Looking Glass is about technology adoption  in the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) as told from the inflection  point of a disaster. In 2020 the world lived through a disaster of epic  proportions, devastating humanity around the globe. It took a  microscopic virus to wreak havoc on our healthcare system and force the  adoption of technology in a way that had never been seen before. This  book tells the story of digital technology take-up in the NHS through  the lens of that disaster.
The COVID-19 pandemic is the most  significant global health crisis to occur since the advent of digital  technologies, ubiquitous data, and widespread use of mobile  technologies. This book documents use of technology in the NHS through  the lens of the first pandemic shock. This healthcare system, paid for  by general taxation and free at the point of demand, was conceived and  developed in a firmly analogue world. Created in 1948, the NHS predates  the invention of the World Wide Web by some forty years. This is not a  book simply about technology, it is a study of the painful process of  reengineering a mammoth and byzantine system that was built for a  different era.
This book is about more than technology. The  digital health sector is a microcosm of the wider healthcare system,  through which grand themes of social inequality, public trust, private  versus commercial interests, values and beliefs are played out. The  sector is a clash of competing discourses: the civic and doing good for  society; the market and wealth creation; the industrial creating more  efficient and effective systems; the project expressed as innovation and  experimentation; lastly the notion of vitality and leading a happier,  healthy life. Each of these discourses exists in a state of flux and  tension with the other. Oscillating between them, this book is offered  as a critique of the role of digital technologies within healthcare. It  is an examination of competing interests, approaches, and ideologies. It  is a story of system complexity told through analysis and personal  stories.