Digital Innovation: Failures and a Best Practice in Digital Health for Fragile Patients During and Beyond the Covid-19 Pandemic

International evidence shows several benefits of the "dematerialization" of medical prescription (e-prescribing) for stay-at-home fragile individuals during and beyond the COVID-19 emergency, particularly in countries where digital health practices were already diffused (Koster et al., 2020; Craston et al., 2020; Urik et al., 2020). In Italy, unprecedented e-prescribing protocols aiming at avoiding contacts at the point of care and relying on user's availability to use Information and Communication Technologies failed to reach the digitally illiterate, fragile, stay-at-home people, particularly the older population, in great need of medications during the pandemic lockdown (Murero, 2021, 2022). This study presents how the initial failure of ICT-based digital health policy turned to partial success and critically reflects on the controversial future of digital health for digitally illiterate citizens and fragile people. Our empirical findings (n=156, 2 years, ongoing) show that 1) innovative workers (interdigital agents)"invisibly” secured home medication to old people during the 2020 lockdown, substituting caregivers and volunteers: they turned innovation aging failure into success thanks to access to mobile technology and digital literacy; 2) in 2021 and 2022 health care providers, caregivers and even senior citizens broadly adopted e-prescribing; 3) innovative practices appear to affect the social health relation by significantly) changing places of access to care, b) creating new socio-tech networked connections when fragile stay-at-home people suffer from (at least) one chronic condition (i.e., high blood pressure, asthma, diabetes, metabolic disfunctions). Previous literature showed the importance of situational practice and informal work supporting aging care besides "formal" regulation. Building on the theoretical work of Mol (praxiography, 2002, 2010) and Murero (interdigital communication theory, 2012, 2020), the presentation investigates, with an ethnographic approach, how e-prescription modifies trajectories of care (Glaser and Strauss,1968) and family care re-organization (Riemann and Schütze, 1991) around fragile people, disproportionally affected by COVID-19 severe complications (Mueller et al., 2020). Finally, the work critically questions the limits of digital health future development in light of individual digital literacy, from teen to seniors, and the degree of acceptance of highly innovative digital therapeutics (SMILER serious game) aimed at reducing stress through human-machine interactions.