The Electronic Patient: Medicine and the Challenge of New Media

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7. PROJECT SUMMARY / ABSTRACT What can the history of analog technologies like the telephone and the television teach us about the future of digital medicine? Electronic media now determine how tens of millions of Americans and many others around the world access healthcare. This new reach of “digital medicine”, “medicine at a distance”, or “connected care” promises to break down geographical disparities in access, to alter the fundamental modes of communication of the doctor-patient relationship, and reshape the production, circulation, and consumption of medical knowledge as we know it. Yet for every inspirational account of how digital medicine can increase access and value in healthcare, the expansion of electronically-mediated medicine has also opened a number of ethical and social concerns for clinical medicine and health policy. This grant will support production of a book-length analysis reframing our understanding of the role of new digital media in medicine by examining the continuity— and change—in successive challenges posed by a series of older “new media” in medicine from the late 19th century to the present: telephone medicine in the late 19th and early 20th century, radio medicine in the first half of the 20th century, and television medicine in the latter half of the 20th century. Using new archival materials, literature analysis, and oral histories, it will trace common features in the hopes and fears of both clinicians and patients as each of these new communications took hold of the popular imagination and allowed clinicians to create new forms of medicine at a distance. Beyond these initial congruencies, this analysis will also mark key shifts in the reception of different of technologies and the ways in which they were put into use: how did each technology take shape at the interface of inventors, manufacturers, and users? How was its reception shaped by the changing economic, political, and social contexts of health and health care in each of these periods? While contemporary telehealth devices are far more sophisticated than the telephones used in medical systems in the 1890s, the radiotelemetry devices used in the 1930s, or the two-way televisions used in the 1960s, the ethical, economic, and logistical concerns they raise are prefigured in these earlier episodes. Support from the NLM G13 program will provide part-time research funding to support the PI for three years of manuscript preparation and final archival research during this period.