[Patient Narrative Flattening in Digital Health:A Discussion]

Digital health has improved the efficiency of information processing while also changing how patients' illness narratives enter healthcare systems.Patient narrative flattening refers to the excessive compression of patient narratives during digital processing,whereby temporal trajectories,life contexts,value preferences,and other dimensions of illness experience are diminished.It is mainly manifested in the compression of narrative content during expression,the fragmentation of information in clinical documentation,and the fixation of information in subsequent use.Such flattening may constrain clinical understanding,affect clinical decision-making and patient-clinician interaction,and allow governance risks to accumulate when these data are further used in research,evaluation,and algorithmic applications.In the digital era,narrative medicine should attend to the loss of patient narratives in digital transformation and preserve their significance for clinical understanding and healthcare practice.