Digital health ‘from above’ and ‘below’: Cases from Italy

During my ethnographic research in Milan between 2018-2019, from interviews with patients and doctors, consulting regional, national and EU reports, and participation in hospital meetings, I learnt about the development of digital health in the city of Milan, the region of Lombardy, and across Italy. Digital or mobile health (mHealth) has been developing in and across Italy in recent years[i]. Since 2016, a few regions such as Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, and Tuscany have been particularly active in this field, and Lombardy’s activity in digital healthcare is above the national average.[ii] Developments in this area have since been impacted by the coronavirus pandemic during 2020, in Italy, and in Lombardy in particular, which saw the highest number of cases in Italy in early 2020. Digital technologies have played a significant role during the pandemic in a number of core areas relating to health from regional and national healthcare access communication and delivery and nascent public-private partnerships, to the everyday experience of lockdown. Amid the pandemic, the country has witnessed an increase in state engagement with the digital, including a range of public-private partnerships that, for example, offer ‘digital solidarity’ packages to citizens[iii] and seek to warn against ‘fake news’ about the virus that has been shared across social media. In March 2020, the Italian Ministry of Health published a warning list of ten particularly pertinent ‘fake news’ items about the coronavirus that were circulating across the Italian social web, urging the public to be vigilant about this issue.[iv]

During my broader ethnographic research studying ageing, care, and smartphones in Milan, I found that formal and informal policies and practices exist within a nexus of an emerging digital health scene ‘from above’, and a diverse adoption of digital practices by people of different ages and backgrounds ‘from below’. Amongst research participants who were smartphone users, googling for information about health and using WhatsApp to communicate with and care for others, for example, could be popular activities not wholly distinct from broader uses of smartphones for care and communication. Concurrently, these practices could also go hand in hand with the spread of mis/disinformation[v].

As such, although Milan and Lombardy are leading sites within Italy for healthcare and digital innovation, a range of factors continue to affect the equity of healthcare access, delivery and uptake, online and offline; such as income, socio-economic factors, regional location, and language; and these factors all play a role in the differentiated experience of living and ageing with smartphones in Milan that I explored during my research in Italy, and which are core themes in my forthcoming book as part of the ASSA book series with UCL Press, Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy: Care and Community in Milan and Beyond (2021).

References

[i] The uptake of mHealth in Italy has been reported as steady while slower than in other European countries such as Estonia and Denmark. Kostera, Thomas. 2019. ‘Digital health – Europe is moving at different speeds’. The Digital Patient (blog), 25 April. https://blog.der-digitale-patient.de/en/digital-healtheurope/. Accessed 23 November 2020.

[ii] See Postelnicu, Leontina. 2019. ‘Q&A: How Italy is working to digitise healthcare’. Healthcare IT News, 23 October. https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/europe/qa-how-italy-working-digitise-healthcare. Accessed 23 November 2020.

[iii] In Italy during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, ‘digital solidarity’ packages were offered to bridge some of the socio-economic and digital gaps highlighted and perpetuated by the virus, at a time when digital practices of care and communications had taken on heightened significance. See Agenzia per l’Italia Digitale. 2020. ‘Solidarietà Digitale al servizio di studenti e commercianti’. Solidarietà Digitale. https://solidarietadigitale.agid.gov.it/#/. Accessed 21 November 2020.

[iv] See Ministero della Salute 2020 Salute (Ministry of Health). ‘Covid-19, occhio alle bufale’. http://www.salute.gov.it/portale/news/p3_2_1_1_1.jsp?lingua=italiano&menu=notizie&p=dalministero&id=4380. Accessed 23 November 2020.

[v]The distinction between misinformation and disinformation has been defined in terms of intentionality. The former describes the sharing of information regardless of intention, while the latter involves the intention to mislead, misinform and/or manipulate. See: https://www.dictionary.com/e/misinformation-vs-disinformation-get-informed-on-the-difference/ and https://en.unesco.org/fightfakenews