[Series] The digital determinants of health: a new era for global public health

AI Summary

The article examines how digital transformation shapes health and wellbeing through unequal access, technology use, and broader sociotechnical structures. It presents the digital determinants of health as operating through political norms, economic incentives, infrastructure, and social practices, with effects on human and planetary health.

Digital transformations exert increasing influence over the lives of the global population, shaping opportunities and generating harms for health and wellbeing across the spectrum of digital access and engagement. The scale of influence of digital transformations on human and planetary health marks the urgency of attention to the digital determinants of health (DDoH). In this Series paper, we describe a prevailing digital sociotechnological order (DSTO) as the structural source of the DDoH. The DSTO is composed of a set of dominant assumptions that motivate digital practices operating through four features (political norms, economic logics, infrastructures, and personal and social practices) to affect human and planetary health.