Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Social Consequences of the Informationalization of Healthcare in the U.S. and India

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Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Social Consequences of the Informationalization of Healthcare in the U.S. and IndiaWorldwide, health information technologies, such as telehealth systems, have been introduced as ways to reduce costs and healthcare access disparities. Yet the social implications of these informationalizing technologies, and variations in how social contexts shape the implementation in everyday practice, are poorly understood. This research project fills those gaps by observing and analyzing how the dramatic expansion of telehealth and data-based medical technologies are reshaping medical knowledge, clinical practice, and healthcare organizations in the rural United States and in rural India. Evidence is gathered using participant observation and in-depth interviews with care providers, patients, and project developers. Bringing together theories from communication studies and science, technology & society studies, this project provides new insights about the causes of the growing uses of new kinds of data in healthcare across the globe, the challenges and opportunities these data pose for healthcare delivery and management, for the ways that patients and their bodies are conceptualized and treated, and the organizational and institutional arrangements needed to meaningfully utilize these data for patient health. Because India is a global leader in telehealth, the reserach here will contribute to studies that investigate the blurring of the boundary between the developed and the developing world. The findings will provide new theoretical and practical insights to healthcare and development practitioners and to researchers in the fields of communication and science, technology and society. Finally, the project also has implications for debates among healthcare policy makers and technology developers as they rethink relationships among healthcare technology, information infrastructure, and notions of development, in order to imagine possible futures for healthcare.