%0 Journal Article
%T Human-Centered Digital Healthcare: Balancing Technological Innovation With Trust, Accessibility, Emotional Connection, and Patient Agency
%A Wouter De Smet
%A Liesbeth Van Dam
%A Pieter Janssens
%J International Journal of Social and Psychological Aspects of Healthcare
%@ 3108-4818
%D 2026
%V 6
%N 1
%R 10.51847/rypziPer4h
%P 174-185
%X Digital healthcare is often evaluated through technical performance, adoption, efficiency, and scalability, yet these measures incompletely represent whether digitally mediated care remains acceptable, usable, relationally meaningful, and responsive to patients’ interests. This conceptual article develops a human-centered account of digital healthcare in which technological value is conditional on the conditions under which people encounter, interpret, and act through digital systems. The analysis distinguishes trust from trustworthiness; availability from accessibility, usability, and digital capability; digital participation from patient agency; data collection from legitimate data use; and automation from appropriately allocated human judgment. It further argues that emotional presence and relational continuity should be treated as substantive properties of care rather than optional additions to otherwise successful technological delivery. Evidence concerning digital literacy, therapeutic relationships, health-data sharing, artificial intelligence, empowerment, and digital inequity is integrated into a proposed multilevel architecture linking individual capability, patient-professional relationships, institutional conduct, technological characteristics, and structural conditions. The model does not assume that greater digitization necessarily produces either empowerment or exclusion. Instead, digital technologies may expand, constrain, or redistribute opportunities for participation depending on usability, resources, control, institutional trustworthiness, care context, and available alternatives. Human-centered digital healthcare is therefore framed as a problem of alignment: technological innovation becomes clinically and socially meaningful when technical capability is matched by warranted trust, usable access, relational adequacy, meaningful choice, proportionate data governance, and mechanisms for human judgment where uncertainty or consequence requires it.
%U https://smerpub.com/article/human-centered-digital-healthcare-balancing-technological-innovation-with-trust-accessibility-emo-nk9cekefhi4ifez