Telecare Technologies and the Transformation of Healthcare

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

   PDF

2. Introduction

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

      PDF

   2. Who Cares?

      • Nelly Oudshoorn

      Pages 3-16

   3. Theorizing Technology and the Transformation of Healthcare

      • Nelly Oudshoorn

      Pages 17-31

3. Reordering Care

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 33-33

      PDF

   2. Promises, Scenarios, and Silences

      • Nelly Oudshoorn

      Pages 35-67

   3. Resistance and Boundary Work

      • Nelly Oudshoorn

      Pages 68-88

4. Creating New Forms of Care

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 89-89

      PDF

   2. Telecare Workers: The Invisible Profession

      • Nelly Oudshoorn

      Pages 91-123

   3. How Places Matter in Healthcare: Physical and Digital Proximity

      • Nelly Oudshoorn

      Pages 124-141

5. Redefining Patients and Home

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 143-143

      PDF

   2. Patients as Diagnostic Agents: Invisible Work and Selective Use

      • Nelly Oudshoorn

      Pages 145-167

   3. Inspecting Bodies and Coping with Disease at Home

      • Nelly Oudshoorn

      Pages 168-189

   4. Conclusions: The Importance of Place, Proximity and Diversity

      • Nelly Oudshoorn

      Pages 190-211

6. Back Matter

   Pages 212-241

   PDF

Winner of the British Sociological Association Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize, 2012. 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.

• care
• health
• healthcare
• profession
• transformation

Winner of the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize 2012 Winner of the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize 2012

• University of Twente, The Netherlands

  Nelly Oudshoorn

Nelly Oudshoorn is Professor of Technology Dynamics and Healthcare at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. Her research interests focus around issues of the development and use of new technologies in healthcare. She is the recipient of the Rachel Carson Prize awarded by the Society for Social Studies of Science (2005), the Diana Forsythe Award of the American Medical Informatics Association (2009) and the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize (2012).

Policies and ethics