Unboxing the Clinical Health Technology Deployment

Recent years have seen numerous clinical deployments of digital technologies in support of new practices of healthcare. Mobile devices in particular offer many advantages in regard to their deployment for the purposes of shaping care. Yet, these systems and their implications for practice are not predetermined but crafted, often in unforeseen ways, by design. Amidst growing knowledge of complex clinical contexts, human–computer interaction researchers have come to understand the need to approach design as participatory, iterative process grounded in research, and informed by the experiences of stakeholders broadly defined. In this article we build upon prior efforts to support care, by making the case for a recentering of the artefacts we perceive as “designed,” “designable,” and “design-worthy” in the creation and implementation of the digital health intervention. In doing so, we draw on the example of a mobile health technology platform to support mental healthcare through Danish primary care.