Beyond Technological Solutionism: Rethinking XR in Healthcare

Abstract

The healthcare industry's enthusiastic adoption of Extended Reality (XR) technologies obscures a concerning reality: we were building increasingly sophisticated ways to perpetuate fundamentally broken healthcare systems. Through three deeply personal narratives - a rural patient cut off from care infrastructure, an urban professional navigating fragmented services, and a first-generation immigrant confronting cultural barriers - this provocation paper exposes how our obsession with technological innovation often worsens rather than resolves healthcare disparities. By applying the SEIPS 3.0 model to examine diabetes-CVD care coordination, we identify an"innovation paradox"where advanced technology creates new barriers to effective care. Our care interdependencies framework reveals that healthcare outcomes are shaped primarily by human relationships (50-60%), organizational coordination (25-30%), and sociocultural factors (15-20%), not technological sophistication. This research challenges the HCI community to confront its role in perpetuating healthcare inequities, demands a fundamental rethinking and proposes a new framework for healthcare innovation that prioritizes human relationships over technical capability, systemic change over feature sets, and actual care delivery over technological ambition. For healthcare providers, technology developers, and policymakers, our findings suggest that effective care coordination requires us to step back from our techno-solutionist mindset and engage