Weaving EU digital health policy into national healthcare practices. The making of a reimbursement standard for digital health technologies in Belgium

摘要: Along the hopes and fears around the recent rise of Digital Health Technologies (DHT), EU and Member State (MS) policymakers have sought to find ways to translate these innovations into tangible trustworthy and reliable tools for health and care practices. While these translation-efforts have been developed across different healthcare contexts with their own histories, practices, and values, their increasing entanglement has over the years raised several implementation issues between EU and MS policy initiatives. While policymakers have struggled to understand the reasons behind this, this article proposes to ‘move focus’ towards a socio-technical understanding of DHT by investigating how these alignment attempts come about in practice. For this we focus on Belgium's frontrunning attempt to develop a reimbursement framework for DHT. Drawing on a document analysis of EU and Belgian policy, media, and …