Do patients really want to be empowered?

Katherine Benjamin, digital services manager at NHS England, asks some clever questions in this Medium piece:

“Digital health services and wearable technologies are meant to empower users to change behaviours and become better informed, more engaged patients. However, to what extent has the rhetoric of empowerment in digital healthcare been diluted to the point that when we speak of “empowering users”, what we really mean is “let’s get the patient to do our job for us”? Far from an academic exercise, understanding empowerment is crucial to developing a product that resonates with consumers and appeals to decision makers in macro health systems. We must ask ourselves, do patients really want to be empowered?”