Health Technology Development and Use: From Practice-Bound Imagination to Evolving Impacts

Most industrialized countries have faced the rising cost of health care services since the 1980s and expect health care costs to only continue to rise in coming decades. As recently as the last US presidential election, technology has been touted as the 'medicine' that can 'cure healthcare,' saving billions of dollars in taxpayer dollars. But the continuous adoption of new technology is also argued to be the major cost-driver for health care.Health Technology Development and Use: From Practice-Bound Imagination to Evolving Impacts maps out the complex, emergent relationship between users and designers, offering three outstanding case-studies of the development and use of new health technology. These studies follow the evolution of new health technology in detail through several rounds of design and deployment across various organisations, showing that in order to be truly useful, design concepts must continually be revised and reworked in the light of the practical experiences of implementation and use ' a lesson with implications for healthcare technology and beyond.The "biographies of technologies and practices" approach to new technology advanced in this volume offers us urgent new insight to core empirical and theoretical questions about how where development projects gain their representations of future use and users, how usage is actually designed, how users' requests and modifications affect designs and what kind of learning takes place between developers and users in different phases of innovation'”all crucial to our understanding and ability to advance new health technology, and innovation more generally.