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Short abstract:

Public policy shapes emerging fields like HMI, influencing agendas and visions. We analyze German healthcare technology policy, revealing narratives of crisis and tech solutions, alongside aspirations for “good care” and “good work” in healthcare, which we critically discuss.

Long abstract:

Public policy plays an important role in shaping emerging sociotechnical fields like Human-Machine Interaction (HMI), intervening into these innovation spaces not only by allocating public funds and enacting legislation, but also by setting agendas, articulating strategies and visions, and thereby conjuring up collective imaginations of desirable futures. In this presentation, we examine the sociotechnical imaginary of healthcare technology constructed in German public policy, drawing on our analysis of 21 pertinent German policy documents from the years of 2018-2022. Drawing on a conceptual frame of sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2015) and dramaturgical studies of futuring (Oomen et al. 2022), our study provides a critical analysis and discussion of the pervasive storylines in German public policy of healthcare technology. We show how healthcare is imagined as a sector in crisis, how digital, robotic, and AI-enabled technology is promoted as a solution, and how anticipated resistances to technological solutions are being met with the narratives of “technological assistance”, the provision of “good care”, and the facilitation of “good work” within the healthcare sector. However, we argue that, despite its discursive association with good care and good work, the emphasis on technological innovation as the primary solution for healthcare challenges tends to obscure critical determinants of care and work quality. We advocate for pursuing a nuanced understanding of the implications of dominant narratives shaping collective action within fields like HMI in healthcare.