CITATION: Editorial, Volume 408, Issue 10565 p1673 October 24, 2026
Digital technology for health, not harm
The Lancet
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(26)01991-4/fulltext?dgcid=raven_jbs_etoc_email
EXTRACTS
The Lancet Series on the digital determinants of health comes at a pivotal time, when intervention is needed to prioritise health as digital technologies are increasingly integrated into our everyday lives. The Series defines the digital determinants as the structural conditions that affect health and wellbeing through digitally mediated infrastructures, business models, design choices, and information environments...
The Series examines the association between digital media use and health outcomes in children and adolescents, a population at particular risk: they are undergoing rapid neurobiological development; exposures begin early and may have cumulative effects across the life course; and young people have limited control over the systems affecting them...
Although young people are a priority, they are not the only group at risk. Less digitally literate older adults can be particularly susceptible to misinformation, fraud, and digital exclusion...
This Lancet Series lays the foundations for a public health approach that treats digital systems as structural determinants of health; puts health at the centre of digital progress; and outlines a path towards digital governance in the public interest.
COMMENT (NPW): The lead paper in the Commission notes:
'In the first paper of this Series, we describe how an emerging digital sociotechnological order (DSTO) drives the DDoH and their effects on global public health, aiming to illuminate opportunities to protect and promote public health in a context of rapidly evolving technological capabilities and drastic inequities in digital resources between countries... In this Review, we aim to articulate the relationships between digital technologies, the social systems in which they are embedded, and public health.
The full paper is available here: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(26)01292-4/fulltext
Key messages
- The digital determinants of health (DDoH) can be understood as the structural effects of a prevailing digital sociotechnological order from a public health perspective
- The prevailing digital sociotechnological order presents structural risks to global public health
- The DDoH influence public health for the global population, including those who have little or no access to digital technologies, by shaping political norms, economic logics, infrastructural investments, and personal and social practices internationally
- Public health should evolve to anticipate the health-related effect of new developments in digital technology, such as artificial intelligence and its deeper embedding in human lives
'Digital environments: The sociotechnical spaces within which individuals, communities, and institutions act, communicate, and make meaning. They are constituted by the interaction of infrastructures and systems—including networks, devices, platforms, algorithmic processes, data economies, and information ecosystems.'
I have not read the full text, but I would agree that there is a need for us to better understand information ecosystems, including and especially (for our purposes) the global evidence ecosystem. www.hifa.org/ecosystem
Best wishes, Neil
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org