Welcome to the New Era of Digital Health: Power, Politics and the Fight for Justice in the Age of AI

Thursday, 21 May 2026, 11am to 12.30pm

Innovative digital technologies, such as AI, hold significant promise to further the global attainment of health and well-being. Such technologies could provide access to professional and personalized care at speed, scale and low-cost. However, in this field, the values, interests and ultimate goals of regulators, scientists, tech providers, and civic society (including patients) often clash and collide. The imaginaries, market-led promises and narratives that are circulated seem compelling: better public health, transformative innovation, and the seamless integration of digital tools and technologies with healthcare systems, practices and people. Yet, the realities that we end up with are often very different: public-private partnerships that are choreographed in favour of Big Tech and their exploitative business models; the implementation of powerful, yet untested and unstable AI models into real-life applications; and mounting justice issues that are rippling across society, whereby the most vulnerable are disproportionately affected by digital technologies, data and AI. This guest lecture explores the complexities, entanglements and crossroads at which digital health as a field now lives and stands. It also asks the question - and hopefully also provides some answers - of how we can address the issue of asymmetric power and market politics, and how we can take up the fight for justice to preserve not just the very essence of healthcare but also unlock the power of digital technologies for the greater good.
This talk is part of the Technological Innovation and Digital Health course, which forms part of the Translational Health Sciences programme. This event is free and open to all.

Nicole Gross is an Associate Professor in Business & Society at the National College of Ireland. Her research interests sit in between organization studies, digital tech markets and the ‘greater good’ in the context of healthcare. She is particularly interested how business models and markets work, if/how market trajectories can be changed and what needs to be done to deliver public value in digital healthcare. Nicole is an active member of various research groups (e.g., https://misfires.ucd.ie/) and collaborates with Irish as well as European advocacy groups on issues related to AI and health (e.g., https://healthai.haiweb.org/the-members/). Nicole has been awarded funding from Research Ireland for her recent work on generative AI in healthcare and her research has been widely published in outlets such as Organization Studies, Big Data & Society, Business & Society, Organization, Sociology of Health & Illness, AI &Ethics, Journal of Medical Ethics, BMJ, Health Policy & Technology, and Marketing Theory. Nicole tweets under @tech_spaces.

Speaker(s): Prof Nicole Gross (National College of Ireland)

Series: Translational Health Sciences

Department: Continuing Education (Division)

Organiser: MSc in Translational Health Sciences

Host: Translational Health Sciences Programme

Register here: https://lifelong-learning.ox.ac.uk/events/view/power-politics-and-the-fight-for-justice-in-the-age-of-ai