Abstract
Healthcare organizations strive to become increasingly data-driven. Achieving this vision requires significant efforts to make data accessible, intelligible, and integrated into healthcare practices. In this paper, we explore data work as infrastructuring, focusing on the ongoing practices required to make and maintain data infrastructures in municipal healthcare. Based on an interpretive case study of a Scandinavian health agency, we identify four distinct data infrastructuring work practices: accessing, structuring, reconfiguring, and visualizing data. Our findings show how these practices enable a sociotechnical network of health data embedded in local practices. Through this study, we make three contributions to the research on data work. First, our findings expand the empirical knowledge on data work in healthcare by showing data work in the backrooms of healthcare where data infrastructures are set up and developed. Second, we contribute to the conceptualization of data work by framing it as infrastructuring, meaning data work aimed at enabling a sociotechnical network of health data embedded in local practices. Third, we elaborate on this conceptualization by showing how it involves efforts at transforming data from objects of work to embedded enablers of work.
Recommended Citation
Thunes, Johanne; Moltubakk Kempton, Alexander; and Grisot, Miria, "Making Health Data Infrastructures: An Infrastructuring Perspective on Data Work" (2025). SJIS Preprints (Forthcoming). 16.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/sjis_preprints/16