Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Email: benjamin. The widely used socioecological rainbow model from Dahlgren and Whitehead specifies determinants of health inequity on multiple hierarchical levels and suggests that these determinants may interact both within and between levels. At the time of its inception, digital determinants only played a minor role in tackling inequities in public health and were therefore not specifically considered.
This has dramatically changed: From today's perspective, health inequities increasingly depend on digital determinants. In this article, we suggest adapting the Dahlgren-Whitehead model to reflect these developments. We propose a model that allows formulating testable hypotheses, interpreting research findings, and developing policy implications against the background of the global spread of digital technologies.
This may facilitate the development of a new line of research and logic models for public health interventions in the digital age. Using the COVID pandemic as a case study, we illustrate how the digitization of all aspects of life affects the different levels of determinants of health inequities in the DahlgrenβWhitehead model. In doing so, we deliberately argue for not introducing a separate digital sphere in its own right, but for understanding digitization as a phenomenon that permeates all levels of determinants of health inequities.
As a result, we present a digital rainbow model that integrates Dahlgren and Whitehead's model with digital environments to identify current health promotion and research issues without changing the rainbow model's initial structure. Keywords: Digital health, digital divide, health inequity, rainbow model, socioecological model. At the time of writing this article, the COVID pandemic was an ongoing global health threat, with implications reaching into virtually all aspects of everyday life.
In this context, digital non-pharmaceutical interventions such as contact tracing apps, proximity recording devices, or QR-code-based admission systems highlighted the increasing importance of digital tools in public health. However, during the course of the pandemic, it has also become evident how such tools can cause health inequitiesβfor example, through limited access to digital infrastructure, 2 lack of high-quality data that would allow developing of targeted measures for minorities, 3 or digital tools that were not tailored to the needs and abilities of their target populations.
