Paper short abstract:

Telehealth—healthcare provided at a distance—is often employed to address gaps in the access to care. This paper argues that the use of telehealth involves both material and immaterial infrastructural shifts in the healthcare landscape, leading to new understandings of care and sociality.

Paper long abstract:

Telehealth refers to any type of healthcare provided at a distance. This includes telephone calls from a doctor, sending a picture of a rash to a dermatologist over text, or speaking face-to-face over video-conferencing technology with a healthcare professional. New Mexico, in the Southwestern United States, is sparsely populated with a large part of the population living in rural areas, often hours away from a larger city. For multiple reasons, this state has turned to telehealth as one way of providing care to its residents who otherwise do not have access to many healthcare resources in their local areas. Drawing on ethnographic material from within the mental healthcare system in urban and rural New Mexico, this paper explores New Mexico's shifting health infrastructural landscape, as the absence of one type of infrastructure (healthcare workers) is addressed and replaced by the presence of another (broadband connections, computer screens, and software programmes that link virtually to healthcare workers located elsewhere). This infrastructural transformation raises important questions about related immaterial infrastructures: social relations within health systems and the logics and values surrounding care. This paper argues that the use of telehealth involves a material and immaterial reconfiguration of health infrastructure, leading to new forms of care and sociality in New Mexico's health system.