Digital health and the platformization of the Brazilian Government

Abstract The implementation of digital health constitutes an enormous challenge to Public Health, making it imperative to call for an urgent debate regarding the more immediate impacts of digital technologies on health policies. Digital health involves the incorporation of new technologies and potentially reconfigures the relationship between Government and society, in a process known as platformization - of health services management through the interpretation of a huge volume of data. This work provides a historic overview of Brazilian digital health information policies and analyzes digital health as a case of platformization of the Brazilian Government. For this reason, this work analyzes the Brazilian digital health strategy from three dimensions: data concentration, users/consumers, and the privatization of public infrastructure. Lastly, this work seeks to highlight the global trend in favor of an innovation that conceals the expectation for digitalization as a driver of the reproduction of capitalism.

摘要 数字健康（digital health）的落地对公共卫生（Public Health）构成了巨大挑战，亟需就数字技术对卫生政策的更直接影响展开紧急研讨。数字健康涵盖新兴技术的融入，且有可能重塑政府与社会的关系，这一进程被称为平台化（platformization）——即通过解析海量数据开展卫生服务管理的过程。本研究梳理了巴西数字卫生信息政策的历史演进脉络，并将数字健康作为巴西政府平台化的典型案例展开分析。基于此，本研究从三大维度对巴西数字健康战略展开分析：数据集中化、用户/消费者群体，以及公共基础设施的私有化。最后，本研究旨在凸显这一支持特定创新的全球趋势——其掩盖了将数字化视作资本主义再生产驱动力的真实诉求。