Health technology assessment in its local contexts: studies of telehealthcare

Carl May, Maggie Mort, Tracy Williams, Frances Mair and Linda Gask

Social Science & Medicine, 2003, vol. 57, issue 4, 697-710

Abstract: Health technology assessment (HTA) is one of the major research enterprises of late modernity, reaching into fields of previously autonomous professional practice, and critically interrogating the organisation and delivery of health care. The 'evaluation' of new health technologies within the field of HTA is increasingly a normative political expectation, as discourses of 'evidence-based' practice run through health policy in the UK and elsewhere. Despite its importance in governing the direction of innovation in health care delivery, there are hardly any empirical studies of HTA in practice. In this paper, we draw on two ethnographic studies of telehealthcare implementation and evaluation in the UK to explore the practical conduct of HTA, and we focus specifically on the social organisation and conduct of randomised controlled trials of these new technologies. The paper examines how evaluation forms a mediating set of practices that make the embedding or normalisation of a new technology possible; and present a simple model of the social and technical contingencies within the evaluation process.

Keywords: Telehealthcare; Health; technology; assessment; Evaluation; Contingency; model; UK (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277-9536(02)00419-7
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:57:y:2003:i:4:p:697-710

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
http://www.elsevier. ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

Access Statistics for this article

Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian

More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().