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As healthcare goes digital, who risks being left behind?
How digital healthcare systems are affecting loneliness, isolation and access to care among older adults.
Chandler Tyrrell, a PhD researcher at Atlantic Technological University (ATU), is exploring how the shift towards digital health and the wider digitalisation of healthcare systems is shaping the everyday lives of older adults, particularly in terms of daily routines, social connections, and experiences of loneliness and social isolation.
From booking appointments to tracking prescriptions and monitoring health, many everyday aspects of care are now digital. Yet this shift assumes a level of access and familiarity that not all older adults have, risking new forms of exclusion.
For many older adults, this is fast becoming the new reality of healthcare. As Chandler shares:
Digital health technologies are often developed with improving efficiency and access, but it can also fundamentally reshape how older adults interact with healthcare and with each other.
Hospital visits once meant interacting with healthcare staff and other patients in the waiting room. These moments may have been their main social contact.
Now prescriptions are sent directly to pharmacies, blood test results are communicated via text message, and many GP and consultant appointments take place through teleconferencing. While these developments are often introduced as time and cost-saving measures in response to growing pressure on health services, there is still limited understanding of how they are experienced by older adults in practice.
As healthcare becomes more digitally delivered and less face-to-face, there is a risk that some older adults may become more socially disconnected. Understanding these potential trade-offs, and how to address them, is a central focus of his research.
“When appointments move online, those everyday interactions disappear,” Chandler explains.
“For some people, that efficiency is welcome. For others, it can increase feelings of isolation.”
From The IDEAS Podcast, Chandler Tyrrell on loneliness, isolation, and digital health
This study is particularly timely with loneliness and social isolation now increasingly recognised as major public health challenges.
While loneliness is the feeling of lacking meaningful social connection, social isolation relates to having limited or infrequent contact with others. Both tend to become more common with age, and recent events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, have further highlighted how vulnerable older adults can be to reduced social contact.
In some cases, their effects are comparable to well-established health risks such as smoking or physical inactivity.
Irish charity ALONE warns chronic loneliness can be as damaging to health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
By exploring how digital health is experienced in everyday life, particularly in community and island settings, Chandler’s research aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of whether these technologies enhance connection and access, or risk deepening existing inequalities:
This research is fundamentally about listening and understanding those changes from the perspective of older adults themselves.
“Through meaningful engagement with older adults, we hope to contribute to digital health approaches that are realistic, respectful, and capable of supporting independence, inclusion, wellbeing, and quality of life”, he concluded.
Listen to Chandler Tyrrell and Dr Valerie McTaggart tackle the loneliness epidemic and why ‘nothing about us with us’ matters in digital healthcare on the IDEAS Podcast.
This research is funded under RISE@ATU with supervision by Dr Sinead Keogh, Dr Martin O’Neill and Dr Ken VanSomeren. RISE@ATU is co-funded by the Government of Ireland and the European Union through the ERDF Northern and Western Regional Programme 2021-27.
About Chandler Tyrrell
Chandler Tyrrell is a PhD researcher at Atlantic Technological University under the IDEAS Postgraduate Research Training Programme. His research explores social exclusion among older adults, with a particular focus on amplifying underrepresented voices in health and social care research.
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Photo caption: Chandler Tyrrell, PhD researcher at Atlantic Technological University (ATU).
