Gili Yaron and Violet Petit-Steeghs - Hyping healthcare: the dynamics of innovative healthcare concepts [Hype Studies Conference 2025 presentation]

Abstract

In recent decades, healthcare has seen the rise of numerous ‘innovative concepts’ that aim to transform care provision—from person-centered care and resilience to more recent additions like culturally responsive care. In shaping stakeholders’ understanding and delivery of care, such concepts can be understood as ‘linguistic technologies’ (Dehue 2023). As they circulate in policy and practice, healthcare concepts often exhibit hype-like dynamics, including temporal booms, overpromising, and strategic rhetoric (Bareis et al. 2023). Yet, apart from scattered work on healthcare ‘buzzwords,’ little attention has been paid to healthcare concepts as hypes (Bensaude Vincent 2014; Penkler et al. 2019). To better understand the hype-like dynamics of healthcare concepts, we explored the emergence and embedding of three key examples: person-centered care, evidence-based medicine, and positive health. Drawing on an analysis of twenty scientific publications, we identify strikingly similar trajectories across all three. Each concept begins as the catchphrase of a critical movement within science and/or science policy, aiming to challenge the status quo. Proponents’ emancipatory rhetoric then mobilizes field actors—policy-makers, managers, healthcare professionals—to ‘implement’ or ‘roll out’ the concept using various tools developed for this purpose. These efforts, however, often take a top-down approach to conceptual innovation, marked by excessive optimism, instrumentalism, and a limited grasp of complexity. In practice, this approach leads to poor tailoring, conceptual fuzziness, and tokenism—often resulting in cynical disillusionment about the ‘hype’. We conclude that while conceptual innovation holds real transformative potential due to its rallying force, stakeholders must nevertheless avoid the pitfalls of hype. This requires fostering a complexityinformed approach that supports sustained stakeholder engagement, critical reflection at all organizational levels, and the circulation of diverse forms of knowledge.