Intersecting Inequalities and Health Outcomes: A Sociological Analysis of Social Determinants, Digital Health Inequities, and the Changing Landscape of Well-Being in Post-Pandemic Societies

• Author(s): Dr. Y I Chawan
• Paper ID: 1706357
• Page: 979-988
• Published Date: 30-09-2024
• Published In: Iconic Research And Engineering Journals
• Publisher: IRE Journals
• e-ISSN: 2456-8880
• Volume/Issue: Volume 8 Issue 3 September-2024

Abstract

This conceptual paper questions the persistence and change of health disparities through the interplay between long-standing social determinants, most notably class, race, gender, education, and geography, and new forms of health inequity associated with the digitization of everyday life, arguing that the post-COVID-19 era not only deepened entrenched inequalities, but also have led to new forms of stratification in that, although the COVID-19 pandemic revealed and exacerbated dropped access to health care, mental health services, and social protection, the upgrading uptake of telemedicine, algorithm-based diagnostics, personal health technologies, and AI-assisted care delivery across diverse populations has opened opportunities for extended coverage and new forms of exclusion, especially by sections of the population with low digital skills, poor Internet sourcing or the cultural capital to handle them, thus the article builds a claim that individual well-being in contemporary societies has to be theorized as a relational process, conditioned by the co-construction of structural determinants of human health, and the infrastructural components of technology, hence intersecting inequalities not only act to direct health but may also indirectly because differential input on digital health innovations, as for example bias in algorithms driving diagnostic tools with racial minorities more than any other population, the datafication of bodies generated by personal digital health technologies provides fresh opportunities to reinforce taut surveillance logics over already vast populations, and telemedicine, while expanding health care in rural context can deepen urban-rural inequalities in those areas where digital infrastructures are absent, all of which stresses the importance of reframing sociological approaches to health which merge the new digital sociology, adequately fused with traditions established in medical sociology and the sociology of inequality, and this article contributes a conceptual framework to link the micro-level experiences of sickness, stress, and digital exclusion to meso-level dynamics of community-based digital health practice and clinical uptake, and to macro-level policies, global health governance, and platform capitalism, thereby building a theoretical backdrop of potential to analyze the multi-scalar processes through which intertwining inequalities stylize health and well-being in the context of the pandemic of COVID-19 and the mid-2020s, and apropos of an agenda for future research, the article forwards the empirical examination of conceptual frameworks by multiple countries, the critical equity implications of digital health regulations and the recasting of well-being indicators to accommodate both structural and technological mediations, thus securing the central position of the sociological scholarship in the health equity debate for a digitally-mediated and post-pandemic world.

Keywords

Health Inequalities, Social Determinants of Health, Digital Health Inequities, Intersectionality, Post-Pandemic Societies, Well-Being

Citations

IRE Journals:
Dr. Y I Chawan "Intersecting Inequalities and Health Outcomes: A Sociological Analysis of Social Determinants, Digital Health Inequities, and the Changing Landscape of Well-Being in Post-Pandemic Societies" Iconic Research And Engineering Journals Volume 8 Issue 3 2024 Page 979-988

IEEE:
Dr. Y I Chawan "Intersecting Inequalities and Health Outcomes: A Sociological Analysis of Social Determinants, Digital Health Inequities, and the Changing Landscape of Well-Being in Post-Pandemic Societies" Iconic Research And Engineering Journals, 8(3)