Un-working health data: Seeking routes to trace data as a concept and practice in data-driven healthcare

Abstract

This PhD project aims to explore how economic value is generated by data in data-driven technologies and the role of contextual and informal social relations in these valuation processes. Conducting ethnography in existing socio-technical networks ‘in the wild’, this PhD situates its focus on the healthcare sector. This project aims is to explore how the existing data practices, from the micro level of the data- practitioners to the mezzo level of the data stewards, construct value propositions for the ways data value is traded and regulated by the policymakers. Ethnographic fieldwork for this PhD research has already been conducted in two northern European companies in the Health Tech Industry. Further research is planned to be conducted in the public and private healthcare sectors in UK, Denmark and Greece.