Digital Health and the Future of Healthcare with Professor Matthew Goodwin

Module Overview

This module provides an overview of issues in digital health from a variety of perspectives. The readings and videos for the first day provide a general overview to the field from 2009 to the present day. The readings for the second day offers a more specialized look at wearable and home digital health technologies as an important sub-field within digital healthcare, while the videos for this day discuss the affects of racism on healthcare. In addition to readings and videos, this module features two talks delivered by Prof. Matthew Goodwin on the topic. Because it is introductory to the field of digital health that later modules draw upon, this module is best paired with one or more of the later modules.

Day 1: Futures of Digital Health, Part 1

  • Harold Thimbleby “Technology and the Future of Healthcare,” J Public Health Res 2, no.3 (2013): e28.
  • TA Walls, A Corla, SR Forkus, “Citizen Health Science: Foundations of a New Data Science Arena,” Int J Popul Data Sci 4, no.1 (2019): 1074. 
  • Charles P. Friedman, “A ‘Fundamental Theorem’ of Biomedical Informatics,” J Am Med Inform Assoc 16, no.2 (2009): 169-70.
  • Simon C. Matthews, et al., “Digital Health: A Path to Validation,” NPJ Digit Med 2, no.38 (2019)
  • Video lecture with Prof. Matthew Goodwin (100 minutes)

Optional Videos:

Questions to consider/writing prompts:

  1. What kind of future of healthcare is portrayed in each of these readings and videos?
  2. What, according to these speakers and authors is the reason for the turn to or need to turn to digital health and datafied healthcare? Beyond what’s stated, are there additional assumptions about the future that underlie the turn these experts advocate?
  3. Focus on the videos from about a decade ago or longer. Which assumptions about the future still seem relevant and which do not–and why? Have the assumptions that underlie the arguments for digital health and datafied healthcare changed since this earlier moment? If so, how?
  4. Also focusing on this earlier moment: Which predictions have come true and which have not? What do you make of the fact that so few of the examples touted are a mainstream part of healthcare today and what lessons might we draw about that when we talk about or envision the future of healthcare?

Day 2: Futures of Digital Health, Part 2

Questions to consider/writing prompts:

  • What do Goodwin, Velicer, and Intille’s proposals offer the future of healthcare? Where do they fit in the landscape of imagined futures offered on day one?
  • Do the visions of healthcare’s future differ from Goodwin, Velicer, and Intille’s work in 2008 and Clarke et al.’s work in 2017? If so, how?
  • Goodwin’s talk for today, in combination with the videos for today, suggest important considerations for the future of digital health. How do you see the critiques offered by Jones, Williams, and Roberts intervening in the conversation begun by the speakers from day one? Note that, like the videos from day one, these videos appeared at a particular moment in the middle of the 2010s.
  • Finally, now that you have viewed a number of TED talk videos, think about the form of the TED talk. How does it work? What does it do? Think, for example, about how the individuals are encouraged to make arguments for this genre of video, what kinds of evidence they use, how they speak to the audience, and how much time they are allotted. Perhaps compare it to the Gould video to think more about these questions. Of interest: such videos only became publicly available and thus a widespread way of disseminating knowledge in 2006.

Videos

The videos for day one are mostly TED talks that envision the future of healthcare and the promises that a digital and datafied healthcare hold (Dishman, Topol, Kraft). Note that they are part of a boom in healthcare technology that took place a decade into the twenty-first century, and all three videos are from the 2009-2011 period. “Uninvited guests” (2015) demonstrates some of the potential pitfalls of digitizing home healthcare technology. In his introductory talk, Prof. Goodwin discusses the shape of the field with particular attention to wearable and home technology.

The videos for day two are about the social construction of race and the impact of racism in healthcare.  With the exception of Gould (1995), the Jones, Williams, and Roberts were all recorded between 2014 and 2016.

Readings

These readings are all research articles on digital health and the future of healthcare. They focus largely on personal health technologies and range from the initial boom in digital health around a decade into the twenty-first century (Goodwin, Velicer, and Intille, Friedman, and Thimbleby) to those written about a decade later (Walls, Corla, and Fuchs, Matthews, and Clarke).

  • Harold Thimbleby, “Technology and the Future of Healthcare,” J Public Health Res 2, no.3 (2013): e28.
  • TA Walls, A Corla, SR Forkus, “Citizen Health Science: Foundations of a New Data Science Arena,” Int J Popul Data Sci 4, no.1 (2019): 1074. 
  • Charles P. Friedman, “A ‘Fundamental Theorem’ of Biomedical Informatics,” J Am Med Inform Assoc 16, no.2 (2009): 169-70.
  • Simon C. Matthews, et al., “Digital Health: A Path to Validation,” NPJ Digit Med 2, no. 38 (2019).
  • Matthew S. Goodwin,  Wayne F. Velicer, Stephen S Intille, “Telemetric Monitoring in the Behavior Sciences,” Behav Res Methods 40, no.1 (2008): 328-41.
  • Janice L. Clarke, et al., “An Innovative Approach to Health Care Delivery for Patients with Chronic Conditions,” Popul Health Manag 20, no.1 (2017): 23-30.