“Exploring data-work in healthcare” is a workshop organized within Coop2016, the 12th International Conference on the Design of Collaborative Systems.
Data and information have long been a central concern in studies of IT systems in healthcare, since they are an essential part of how coordination, cooperation, and communication are accomplished between co-operating occupations and units in healthcare. These systems have typically been produced by and for clinical and administrative personnel, the producers and primary consumers of the data managed through those systems.
However, two new trends are emerging. Firstly, consumer health informatics has provided laypeople and patients with tools to collect, manage and share bodily parameters, whose measurement once required medical equipment and expertise. The envisioned potential of these data to inform healthcare research and measure quality and outcome of treatment and care has generated much interest and efforts to link and integrate data from the civic, public sphere with clinical data.
Secondly, healthcare managers and policymakers are increasingly interested in accessing and reusing health-data generated from various healthcare IT systems to evaluate performances, redesign services and allocate funding. This may both shape how new ICT systems in healthcare are designed, for instance through increased efforts of structuring the content as well as an increased concern among clinicians how the data they have collected will be used for a range of different purposes.
Accordingly, the landscape of healthcare data-work is undergoing a great transformation. Once generated for strictly clinical reasons, health-data are now increasingly expected to flow across institutional boundaries to be re-used for purposes different from the ones that led to their generation [1]. This circulation of information may require new hybrid technologies [2], additional or new kinds [3], as well as to aggregate, analyze and present it in meaningful ways [4], not to mention that some actors may claim ownerships and restrict its circulation [5].
This workshop focuses on the challenges and the complexities involved in making sense of health data as different actors, in different times and under diverse constraints use them for various purposes.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: data standardization or re-classification across institutional boundaries, re-use of clinical data; design of artifacts and infrastructures; politics of “algorithmic” data interpretation; new forms of healthcare data-work, including new occupations, visualization of healthcare data.
References
- Pedersen, R., Ellingsen, G.: The Electronic Patient Record – sufficient quality for clinical research? ECIS 2011Proceedings. Paper 274.
- Cabitza, F., Simone, C., De Michelis, G.: User-driven prioritization of features for a prospective InterPersonal Health Record: perceptions from the Italian context. Computers in biology and medicine 59 (2015) 202-210.
- Berg, M., Goorman. E.: The contextual nature of medical information. International journal of medical informatics 56 (1999) 51-60.
- Bossen, C., Groth Jensen L., Witt, F.: Medical secretaries' care of records: the cooperative work of a non-clinical group. Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. ACM (2012).
- Piras, E.M., Zanutto, A.: "One day it will be you who tells us doctors what to do!". Exploring the" Personal" of PHR in paediatric diabetes management. IT & People 27 (2014) 421-439.
Interested attendees are requested to submit a short position paper (2 – 4 pages, max. 2000 words according to the Springer template). Send your paper to all the organizers (see contacts). Accepted contributions will be published on the workshop website.