Healthcare and Patient Communication in the Digital Era: A Patienthood and Patient Perspective

This book provides a social and cultural theoretical framework for the digitalization of healthcare communication from a patient-centred perspective.

Through empirical case studies, the book outlines the experiences of patients as the digitalization of healthcare communication re-spatializes and re-temporalizes care and reconstructs patienthood and ill health. To demonstrate how changes in communication impacts health and illness, the book examines the digitalization process from three viewpoints. Firstly, it illustrates how the digitalization of illness enhances the availability of information and peer support, which increases patient empowerment. Secondly, it shows how the digitalization of disease transforms signs of disease in a patient’s body into electronic data, increases the distance between the disease and the patient, and enables diagnosis without a healthcare professional touching a patient’s body. Finally, it explains how the digitalization of sickness changes the power relations founded in health and reconfigures health citizenship.

Filling a theoretical gap in health communication scholarship, this book will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students in the field of Health Communication, Digital Communication, Communication Studies, and Health Sciences. The book also offers healthcare professionals new perspectives to respond to the increasing communicative duties arising from the digitalization of healthcare communication.

Sinikka Torkkola is a Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences at Tampere University, Finland. She is also an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Oulu, Finland.

Anna Sendra Toset is a Project Manager in the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences at Tampere University, Finland.