The digital determinants of health: a new era for global public health.

Digital transformations significantly impact global health, with the digital sociotechnological order influencing health outcomes through four key features.

• Why it matters: Understanding how digital practices shape health is crucial as digital influence grows, affecting both human and planetary wellbeing and highlighting the need for effective governance.
• What they did: The authors analyzed the digital sociotechnological order (DSTO), a set of dominant assumptions and practices across political, economic, infrastructural, and social domains, to identify its role as a structural source of digital determinants of health.
• The result: This work clarifies the DSTO’s influence on health disparities and offers recommendations for studying and governing digital determinants, enabling better management of digital health impacts worldwide.