PhD defence P.B.M. (Pieter) Vandekerckhove

Summary:

Even though digital health, since the Covid-19 pandemic, has proven itself essential in rapidly transforming care, it continues to have a troublesome legacy. In this thesis, we focus on the challenges involving the roles of various stakeholders who are directly and indirectly involved in digital health development. In the field of human-centered design, Generative co-design (GCD) has been advanced as a promising method to improve digital health by including not only designers but also non-designers as stakeholders. GCD therefore includes stakeholders as patients, care professionals, policymakers, managers, technology developers and many more. Since GCD is an iterative, front-end creative process in which stakeholders actively participate, it is expected that the resulting digital health will cater better for the needs of the various stakeholders.

Even though stakeholders play an important role in GCD to develop better digital health, their role remains unclear. In this thesis, we take this first step by exploring the importance of stakeholders’ GCD contributions in developing digital health. We wanted to define the role of stakeholders more clearly and develop a GCD stakeholder theory. Establishing such a theoretical foundation could eventually serve to further develop a GCD methodology about stakeholder involvement in GCD activities for digital health. The main research question was: What is the role of stakeholders in GCD for digital health?