Towards a Digital Health Ecology: NHS Digital Adoption through the
COVID-19 Looking Glass is about technology adoption in the UK'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.
This book documents use of technology in the NHS through the lens of the
first pandemic shock. Our 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.
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. 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.
