Transforming healthcare: policy discourses of IT and patient-centred care

Information Technology (IT) is increasingly seen in policy and academic literature as key to the modernization of healthcare provision and to making healthcare patient‐centred. However, the concept of Patient‐Centred Care (PCC) and the role of IT in the transformation of healthcare are not straightforward. Their meanings need unpacking in order to reveal assumptions behind different visions and their implications for IT‐enabled healthcare transformation. To this end, this paper reviews literature on PCC and IT and analyses England’s health policy between 1989 and 2013. English policy has set out to transform healthcare from organization‐centric to patient‐centred and has placed IT as central to this process. This policy vision is based on contested conceptualizations of PCC. IT implementation is problematic and this is at least partly because of the underpinning goals and visions of healthcare policy. If this misalignment is not addressed then producing technologically superior systems, or better IT implementation strategies, is unlikely to result in widespread and substantial changes to the way healthcare is delivered and experienced. For IT to support a healthcare service that is truly patient‐centred, patients’ needs and wants need to be identified and designed into IT‐enabled services rather than simply added on afterwards.