Reconfiguring patienthood through the digitalization of healthcare communication

This review examines Healthcare and Patient Communication in the Digital Era: A Patienthood and Patient Perspective by Sinikka Torkkola and Anna Sendra Toset. The book offers a theoretically grounded analysis of how digitalization transforms healthcare communication and reconfigures patienthood. The authors conceptualize digitalization not simply as a technological process but as a sociocultural transformation that reshapes communicative relationships among care receivers, care providers, and healthcare institutions. Drawing on Twaddle’s triadic distinction among illness, disease, and sickness, the book analyzes digital healthcare communication from patient, professional, and societal perspectives. Particular attention is given to the digitalization of illness through online patient communities, the emergence of the digital gaze through data-driven healthcare practices, and the transformation of health citizenship in digitally mediated environments. The review contends that the book’s greatest achievement is not its discussion of digital health technologies, but its development of a conceptual framework that explains how healthcare communication mediates the relationship between digitalization and patienthood.