Abstract

AGUDELO-LONDONO, Sandra Milena. Reflecting on e-Health Impact Assessment. “All that glitters is not gold”. Trilogía. Cienc. Tecnol. Soc. [online]. 2020, vol.12, n.22, pp.92-115.  Epub Dec 15, 2021. ISSN 2145-7778.  https://doi.org/10.22430/21457778.1262.

In the contemporary context of public health, information and communication technologies, known as eHealth, have become a first-hand tool to carry out interventions for the population. Despite the boom, its effectiveness is often unknown. In this sense, literature on methods and approaches used in biomedical technologies to assess the digital technological impact has begun to be imported. However, eHealth incorporates qualities of its digital nature that represent new challenges in the social and technical relationships it establishes with the environment. This raises the question of what would be the particular characteristics of a comprehensive assessment of these interventions. To that end, scientific database publications were reviewed between 2010 and 2017 on health information technology assessment to analyze the characteristics to consider when evaluating eHealth interventions. From 520 articles identified, three models were selected that presented a broad perspective for eHealth assessment beyond impact. Although different in their epistemic stances, they included different domains of interventions: technological, social, economic, political and sanitary, with a broader perspective than the traditional biomedical assessment. However, the models still instrumentalize the relationship between technology and society/context and leave gaps in how to operationalize them on the ground. This work seeks to become a document of reference and reflection for designers and/or evaluators of information technologies in health, with a final recommendation: not everything that shines is gold, and sometimes gold doesn’t even shine.

Keywords : Health impact assessment; eHealth; technology assessment; information technology; sociotechnical systems.

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