Is digital technology a technical or adaptive problem in health?

Is digital technology a technical or adaptive problem in health?

by | Mar 29, 2016 | Digital, mental health, NHS stuff, social media | 0 comments

Around three years ago I was invited to speak at a consultant psychiatrists committee meeting about social media and digital technology. I was mid way through my PhD and steeped in online ethnographic research about how people accessing mental health services and practitioners were making use of social networks. I had an inkling that I would have a mixed audience and I knew that not everyone would share my (then*) enthusiasm. As such I spent time preparing a range of compelling examples of digital technologies and social media practices, determined as I was to win over any detractors. I arrived a little early and so listened in to the tail end of an exasperated discussion about the various grinding limitations, obstacles and shortcomings of the in-house electronic patient record (EPR). If my audience’s primary experience of technology in health was such a bad one, then this did not bode well for my presentation – I quickly realised I was going to have to recalibrate. How could I be so naive as to think a conversation about the future potential of digital technologies would be welcomed, when the basics of reliable and effective electronic patient records seemed like a pipe dream? This experience came back to me whilst reading The Digital Doctor – Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age (Wachter, 2015) which is dominated by an expansive analysis of the shortcomings of contemporary electronic patient records. Wachter argues that EPRs have brought many a physician ‘to their knees’ with their clunky, confusing and complex systems (73). It is salutary to note that three years on...
My small act of Facebook solidarity #TheProfileProject #8

My small act of Facebook solidarity #TheProfileProject #8

by | Mar 13, 2016 | #TheProfileProject | 0 comments

Alaric tells the story behind his most recent Facebook profile picture: “I have changed my profile picture many times since I came late to Facebook – a curios skeptic determined not to take it too seriously.  I generally use self portraits, and when Facebook urges users to add rainbows or French flag filters to their profiles, I either ignored or signaled my approval of the cause in more personal ways. The most recent such occasion was the Bataclan shootings in Paris. “My response to this event was partly intellectual, mostly personal. I spent a lot of time in Paris in the 1980s, I still have good friends there and I am a Francophile.  More than that, I see Paris as one of the great achievements of post enlightenment Western culture. For all its many faults like the ring of deprived suburbs, the civilized urbanity of Parisienne life is rightly held to be a template of how life can be lived well. That the IS terrorists chose to attack a concert hall and restaurants just made my feeling more visceral; I have worked in many Paris venues as a sound engineer, I have eaten in Paris restaurants and promenaded along her streets in the evenings. “I understand the west’s culpability in fermenting the crisis in the middle east; from France and Britain drawing lines on maps at Versailles, partitioning liberated Arab lands for their own gain, via the shambles of the British Palestine protectorate, French colonization of Syria, the fawning in front of Saudi oil wealth to the illegal invasion of Iraq… and much more.  After the attack the Internet...