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Abstract
Patient-engaging e-health is promoted as a means to
improve care and change the social order of healthcare
– most notably the roles of patients and healthcare
professionals. Nevertheless, while researchers
across various fields expect and praise such changes,
these social aspects are rarely addressed rigorously in
the literature on the effects of e-health.
In this paper we review the scientific literature
on patient-engaging e-health, with the purpose of
articulating the different ways in which role is conceptualized
in the various strands of literature and
what explicit and implicit assumptions such conceptualizations
entail. We identify three conceptualizations
of the concept of role and exemplify the findings
proposed by studies that apply each of these. We
argue that the identified conceptual differences have
implications for what is found to be at stake when
using e-health to further the involvement of patients
in their own care, and that a more rigorous and reflective
approach to the use of concepts with rich intellectual
histories, such as that of role, will improve
both empirical research in e-health and discussions
of implications for practice.