Stakeholder involvement in generative co-design for digital health

Even though digital health, since the Covid-19 pandemic, has proven itself essential in rapidly transforming care, it continues to have a troublesome legacy. The World Health Organization promotes digital health including Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and robotics to improve healthcare systems. This has led to a rush to pluck these technologies from the market and implement them in care practice. However, the evidence is lacking behind the promises and there have even been negative effects reported regarding the implementation of large-scale costly technologies such as electronic medical records. This raises questions about the promised benefits of digital health in healthcare and how it can be implemented so that all stakeholders would benefit. In this light, it has been suggested to involve patients and care professionals in the development of digital health. In the field of human-centered design, generative co-design (GCD) has been advanced as a promising method to improve digital health by including not only designers but also non-designers as stakeholders. Since GCD is an iterative, front-end creative process in which stakeholders actively participate, it is expected that the resulting digital health will cater better for the needs of the various stakeholders. Even though stakeholders play an important role in GCD aiming to develop better digital health, their role remains unclear. In this thesis, Pieter explores the importance of stakeholders’ GCD contributions in developing digital health. He proposes a new theory about the role of stakeholders in GCD for digital health. He explains that an appropriate procedure should be followed to assemble a group of stakeholders. One must assess each stakeholder based on their background knowledge, inference and communication capabilities to form a stakeholder group. After a preliminary assessment of this procedure, Pieter also found that the selected stakeholder group has a positive impact on the GDC process and its output, which could eventually improve digital health.