Telecare Technologies and the Transformation of Healthcare

Citation

(2012), "Telecare Technologies and the Transformation of Healthcare", Leadership in Health Services, Vol. 25 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhs.2012.21125aaa.006

Telecare Technologies and the Transformation of Healthcare

Telecare Technologies and the Transformation of Healthcare

Article Type: Recent publications From: Leadership in Health Services, Volume 25, Issue 1

Please note these are not reviews of the titles given. They are descriptions of the book, based on information provided by the publishers.Nelly OudshoornPalgrave MacmillanISBN: 9780230300200October 2011

Keywords: Virtual healthcare systems, Telecare technologies, Healthcare responsibilities, Patient involvement

This book traces the changes in healthcare implicated in telecare technologies: information and communication technologies that enable care at a distance. What happens when healthcare moves from physical to virtual encounters between healthcare professionals and patients? What are the consequences for patients when they are expected to do things that used to be done by healthcare professionals? What actually happens when homes become electronically wired to healthcare organizations? These are urgent questions that are, however, largely absent in dominant discourses on telecare.

Drawing on insights from science, technology and human geography, this work opens up novel accounts of the adoption and use of new technologies in healthcare. Nelly Oudshoorn shows how telecare technologies participate in redefining the responsibilities and identities of patients and healthcare professionals, introducing a new category of healthcare workers, and changing the kinds of care and spaces where healthcare is situated. This book intervenes critically into discourses that celebrate the independence of place and time by showing how places and physical contacts still matter in care at a distance.

Contents include:

1. 1.

   Introduction.

2. 2.

   Who cares?

3. 3.

   Theorizing technology and the transformation of healthcare.

4. 4.

   Part I: reordering care:

   • •

     promises, scenarios and silences; and

   • •

     resistances and boundary work.

5. 5.

   Part II: creating new forms of care:

   • •

     telecare workers: the invisible profession.

   • •

     how places matter in healthcare: physical and digital proximity.

6. 6.

   Part III: redefining patients and home:

   • •

     patients as diagnostic agents: invisible work and selective use; and

   • •

     inspecting bodies and coping with disease at home.

7. 7.

   Conclusions: the importance of place, proximity and diversity.