Focus on: Elisa Chanial’s research

Elisa Chanial (Université Sorbonne Paris-Nord) is associated to Work Package 3 “Understanding the Technological expectations/promises”.
What is your general research project about ?
My research program is based on a hypothetical convergence between two transformative logics in the healthcare field:
A technoscientific logic, oriented toward rationalization of care through technology (sensors, platforms, algorithms);
An industrial logic, aimed at organizing care delivery according to modern economics’ principles (efficiency, segmentation, data-driven management).
This convergence is producing tangible effects in healthcare services, redifining coordination mechanisms, expertise, professional responsibilities, and the mere patient’s role and definition. It also generates tensions, shifts in decision-making, and reconfigurations of meaning, which my work seeks to document and analyze.
How do you investigate this convergence of technoscientific and industrial logics?
From this problematization, my work is organized around three complementary axes:
Axis 1 – organizational dynamics in healthcare territories
I strive to analyze digitalization’s impact within territorial healthcare organizations, where new forms of governance, interprofessional collaboration, and digital tool usage for care coordination are being tested.
Axis 2 – transformations in care work
I explore the impact of digital innovations on care and support professions (social care, personal assistance), documenting the reconfiguration of gestures, professional judgment, temporality, and care relationships.
Axis 3 – the nature of care in the digital age
This is about investigating what care is becoming when it is digitalized: what skills are required? Which gestures are displaced? How is the care relationship reformulated or damaged? What are the technological implications in terms of meaning, recognition, responsibility, or exclusion?
The dominant literature on digital health often adopts an instrumental perspective, linking technology to performance. In contrast, my research adopts a critical-realist stance:
It acknowledges the existence of objective phenomena (technological trajectories, devices, organizations), but considers these realities to be mediated by practices, representations, social contexts, and power relations.
I pay close attention to the unintended effects of digitalization, to everyday forms of resistance, creative adaptations, and the vulnerabilities and inequalities it can produce.
What is your methodology ?
My approach prioritizes qualitative and narrative methods, and experiments with hybrid methods, such as the phylogeny of care practices: a method inspired by evolutionary biology, used here to map gradual variations in gestures and organizational forms within digitized care practices.
This methodological approach allows for the objectification of change processes without anchoring them in a binary opposition to a pre-digital healthcare model.
Ongoing empirical work
Community-based screening of frailty
A collaborative research project is underway in a working-class neighborhood of eastern paris, centered around the WHO’s Icope tool for identifying frailty among the elderly.
→ in collaboration with a community health center and a local association, this study explores how technological tools (Icope monitor) interact with precarity, distrust, and unequal access to care.
→ preliminary results were presented at the 13th SFGG congress (Toulouse, June 2025).
Digital vulnerability of older patients
As part of the co-editing of a collective volume (industrial and digital transformation of care, autumn 2025), I am writing a chapter on digital vulnerability, extending reflections initiated during my doctoral research.
Inequalities in access to care and digital vigilance
→ it proposes a critical framework to analyze inequalities generated by digitalization when the latter is not carried out with meaningful efforts in accessibility and mediation.
How does your research align with INNOVCARE ?
My work could contribute to the following axes:
Axis 1: Understanding organizational innovations through situated practices and the professional reconfigurations they entail;
Axis 2: Highlighting the differentiated effects of health technologies on vulnerable populations and the social conditions of their adoption or exclusion;
Axis 3: Critical analysis of prevention policies, focusing on their concrete implementation (tools, protocols, standards) and the tensions they generate in practice.
My research program aims to contribute to the description and understanding of contemporary transformations in the medico-social field through the lens of digitalization, combining qualitative methods, empirical fieldwork, and a critical framework attentive to institutional logics, professional practices, and social inequalities. Participating in INNOVCARE would enable me to extend, share, and structure my findings within a collaborative interdisciplinary and international framework, while reinforcing a research posture that is engaged, partnership-based, and grounded in local contexts.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Sébastien Lechevalier (December 9, 2025). Focus on: Elisa Chanial’s research. INNOVCARE. Retrieved February 15, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15ba3










