AI Insight
This Lancet Series paper introduces the concept of digital determinants of health (DDoH), examining how digital transformations increasingly influence global population health and wellbeing. The authors propose that a digital sociotechnological order (DSTO) serves as the structural foundation for these determinants, operating through four key features: political norms, economic logics, infrastructures, and personal and social practices. This framework addresses both the opportunities and harms generated by digital access and engagement across different populations.
Why it matters
Understanding digital determinants of health is critical for global public health policy as digital technologies become increasingly ubiquitous in healthcare delivery, health information access, and social determinants of health. This framework provides public health professionals and policymakers with a systematic approach to address health inequities arising from digital transformation and to harness digital technologies for improving population health outcomes.
Understand the Science
Digital transformations exert increasing influence over the lives of the global population, shaping opportunities and generating harms for health and wellbeing across the spectrum of digital access and engagement. The scale of influence of digital transformations on human and planetary health marks the urgency of attention to the digital determinants of health (DDoH). In this Series paper, we describe a prevailing digital sociotechnological order (DSTO) as the structural source of the DDoH. The DSTO is composed of a set of dominant assumptions that motivate digital practices operating through four features (political norms, economic logics, infrastructures, and personal and social practices) to affect human and planetary health.
Source: [Series] The digital determinants of health: a new era for global public health