The digital determinants of health: a new era for global public health.

Authors

James Shaw, Nicole Gross, Abril Saldaña-Tejeda, Caesar Atuire, Barbara Prainsack, Louise Holly, Ilona Kickbusch

Published in

Lancet (London, England). Oct 04, 2026. Epub Oct 04, 2026.

Abstract

Digital transformations exert increasing influence over the lives of the global population, shaping opportunities and generating harms for health and wellbeing across the spectrum of digital access and engagement. The scale of influence of digital transformations on human and planetary health marks the urgency of attention to the digital determinants of health (DDoH). In this Series paper, we describe a prevailing digital sociotechnological order (DSTO) as the structural source of the DDoH. The DSTO is composed of a set of dominant assumptions that motivate digital practices operating through four features (political norms, economic logics, infrastructures, and personal and social practices) to affect human and planetary health. We describe the implications of the DSTO for understanding, studying, and governing the DDoH, and present recommendations for future work.

PMID:
42830093
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 05 Oct 2026.

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