Making healthcare data-driven: Ordering, experimenting with, and discovering data

Abstract

Amid growing ambitions to make healthcare data-driven, the practical work and challenges involved in such transitions remain underexplored. Drawing on four years of ethnographic research in a public Danish healthcare Business Intelligence Unit (BIU), this paper examines the everyday data practices involved in making the healthcare organization data-driven through a case of reorganizing human resource data and developing reporting tools for a workplace well-being initiative. We analyze three interrelated processes - ordering, experimenting, and discovering - that characterize the BIU’s efforts to render data actionable. Rather than depicting data-drivenness as a linear or purely rational process, we show how it involves iterative reconfigurations of infrastructure, reverse-engineering opaque vendor logic, and creatively excavating new data traces. These findings highlight the experimental and situated nature of becoming data-driven and offer a practice-based perspective on ‘becoming data-driven’ in healthcare organizations.