The sociotechnical challenge of integrating telehealth into health and social care for the elderly

Telehealth has been heralded as a major mechanism by which elderly people can continue to live at home but numerous pilot studies have not led to it becoming a mainstream contributor to healthcare. This paper concludes that effective telehealth implementation requires considerable organisational change: it is a sociotechnical design challenge. A review of the plans of 25 English health communities to introduce integrated health and social care concludes that they could lead to organisational environments conducive to mainstream deployment of telehealth. However, different kinds of integrated care are planned that make different demands on telehealth and pose different sociotechnical challenges.