e-Health Complexity and Actor-Network Theory

Abstract

e-health constitutes the use of digitally enabled technologies to facilitate the exchange of clinical, administrative, and transactional healthcare data ubiquitously and has the potential to offer enormous value to all actors operating in healthcare. Delivering healthcare benefits by way of e-health solutions, however, remains an elusive goal for e-health entrepreneurs. The inherent complexity of modern healthcare settings has much to answer for this. In attempts to improve current understanding, this chapter argues how e-health research can be enhanced using actor–network theory (ANT) as an appropriate and powerful tool that can enable researchers to “follow the actors” and, in the process, tackle the underlying complexities of modern healthcare environments.