Healthcare Digitalisation and the Changing Nature of Work and Society

Abstract

Digital technologies have profound effects on all areas of modern life, including the workplace. Certain forms of digitalisation entail simply exchanging digital files for paper, while more complex instances involve machines performing a wide variety of tasks on behalf of humans. While some are wary of the displacement of humans that occurs when, for example, robots perform tasks previously performed by humans, others argue that robots only perform the tasks that robots should have carried out in the very first place and never by humans. Understanding the impacts of digitalisation in the workplace requires an understanding of the effects of digital technology on the tasks we perform, and these effects are often not foreseeable. In this article, the changing nature of work in the health care sector is used as a case to analyse such change and its implications on three levels: the societal (macro), organisational (meso), and individual level (micro). Analysing these transformations by using a layered approach is helpful for understanding the actual magnitude of the changes that are occurring and creates the foundation for an informed regulatory and societal response. We argue that, while artificial intelligence, big data, and robotics are revolutionary technologies, most of the changes we see involve technological substitution and not infrastructural change. Even though this undermines the assumption that these new technologies constitute a fourth industrial revolution, their effects on the micro and meso level still require both political awareness and proportional regulatory responses.

Health horizons: Future trends and technologies from the European Medicines Agency’s horizon scanning collaborations

“…This should help to alleviate geographic inequities in healthcare access; however, the opposite effect, due to lack of digital literacy or affordability of the devices, is a risk. It has been reported that AI will also benefit from the digitalization of healthcare and allow for automated decision support for healthcare professionals in patient diagnosis, counsel and treatment ( 51 ). Finally, medicines regulators may be able to use real-world date to monitor medicines effectiveness in the real-world ( 52 ).…”

Managing Directors’ Perspectives on Digital Maturity in German Hospitals—A Multi-Point Online-Based Survey Study

“…However, a considerable number of the managing directors apprehended obstacles, such as the lack of investment budgets and the lack of infrastructure for continuous information processing, as restraining factors. Sætra and Fosch-Villaronga [ 47 ] critically discussed the changing nature of digitalization in healthcare. They introduced a three-level framework in which it is stated that skills and jobs are transforming, but the quality and quantity of care are on different levels.…”

Challenging the Neo-Anthropocentric Relational Approach to Robot Rights

“…Just as the robot rights movement is often perceived as a form of unwarranted and misdirected activism (Birhane and Van Dijk, 2020a;Birhane and Van Dijk, 2020b), the same often goes for environmental ethicists, at times labeled "treehuggers," antihumanists or misanthropes who fight for the rights of animals and the natural world at the expense of human beings (Drengson, 1995;Kopnina et al, 2018;Rottman et al, 2021). Such a denouncement is, however, based on the erroneous notion that there is a "hierarchy of ethics" and that all research should be directed to whichever problems the critics consider to be more important than considering robot-or environmental-rights (Saetra and Fosch-Villaronga, 2021).…”