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

博士论文研究：美国和印度医疗保健信息化的社会后果在全球范围内，医疗信息技术，如远程医疗系统，已被引入作为降低成本和医疗保健获取差距的方法。然而，这些信息化技术的社会影响，以及社会背景如何影响日常实践中的实施，人们知之甚少。该研究项目通过观察和分析远程医疗和基于数据的医疗技术的急剧扩展如何重塑美国农村和印度农村的医疗知识、临床实践和医疗保健组织来填补这些空白。通过参与者观察和对护理提供者、患者和项目开发人员的深入访谈收集证据。该项目汇集了传播学和科学、技术和社会研究的理论，提供了关于全球新型数据在医疗保健中越来越多使用的原因的新见解，这些数据为医疗保健提供和管理带来的挑战和机遇，患者及其身体被概念化和治疗的方式，以及有意义地利用这些数据促进患者健康所需的组织和制度安排。由于印度在远程医疗方面处于全球领先地位，这里的研究将有助于调查发达国家和发展中国家之间边界模糊的研究。这些发现将为医疗保健和发展从业者以及通信和科学、技术和社会领域的研究人员提供新的理论和实践见解。最后，该项目还对医疗政策制定者和技术开发人员之间的辩论产生了影响，因为他们正在重新思考医疗技术、信息基础设施和发展概念之间的关系，以设想医疗保健可能的未来。

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.