Conceptualizing ‘role’ in patient-engaging e-health: A cross-disciplinary review of the literature.

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.