TY - JOUR T1 - Books: <em>Digital Development: Stories of Hope from Health and Social Development</em> JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 32 LP - 33 DO - 10.3399/bjgp23X731673 VL - 73 IS - 726 AU - Trish Greenhalgh Y1 - 2023/01/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/73/726/32.abstract N2 - Sundeep Sahay, Arunima Mukherjee, Geoffrey Walsham, Thomas Hylland Eriksen Practical Action Publishing, 2022, PB, 156pp, £23.95, 978-1788532068New technologies in health and social care are always a pain, right? They get introduced top-down by people who don’t understand front-line work, with the promise that they will increase the efficiency of our jobs — but those hopeful dreams are never fulfilled. In reality, technologies slow our work down; they divert us from our clinical roles into menial data entry tasks; and they allow faceless bureaucrats to monitor and manage us from a distance.If that’s your experience of new health and care technologies (and it’s often been mine), you probably need to read this book. Its authors — two (a computer scientist and a human geographer) from India and two (an anthropologist and a socio-technical systems scholar) from Europe — are fully aware of the gap between what they call ‘high modernist ideology’ and on-the-ground reality. But they ask us to bear with them as they recount some hopeful narratives.A key point made early in the book is that short-term ‘failure’ may contain the seeds of longer-term success, though these may initially be hard to spot. No technology is ever introduced seamlessly in a complex socio-technical system. Rather, people need to learn to use and trust … ER -