The basic goal of the series of BCSSS Vice President Felix Tretter’s workshops on (human) digitization is to make cyber-systemic perspectives of living systems explicit. Health and the health care system are important issues in this context. The aim of the previous workshops (WS I-III) was to examine the epistemic value of individual features of the digitization of our society, especially with regard to Big data as processing technology. For the purpose of this workshop, the term „Health Information and Communications Technology (Assessment)“ (hICTA), was preferred over the more common term „Digital Health Technology (Assessment)“ (DHT or DHTA).

The background of the fourth workshop was the final discussion at WS III, during which a 9-dimensional checklist prepared by Tretter and other physicians was discussed by hICT. This checklist is based on a qualitative system model of health care in the sense of sustainable humane medicine. Workshop IV was therefore about examining the choice of categories of the individual dimensions of the checklist more closely and comparing them with other assessment grids of the DHTA.

Please read the report on the fourth workshop in the series Big Data and Human Digitalization with a summary of all contributions from our distinguished colleagues and guests, Alexander Degelsegger-Marquez, Barbara Prainsack and Gerd Antes.

To learn more about previous workshops, please consider these articles:

Workshop I: Big Data – Epistemological Requests of Systems Science

Workshop II: The “Truth” about health and disease by Big Data

Workshop III: Evaluating Health-Related ICT (hICT)