“All the data you need” – striving for “overview” in cross-sectoral chronic disease management

Abstract

Chronic-care-management relies on the availability of clinical data on a patient’s current health status, as well as data about treatment activities taking place in other sectors and at other points in the patient’s trajectory. In the Danish data-intensive health system, such data are, in principle, already available across sectors through a common national digital health data infrastructure. Nevertheless, the collective opinion among stakeholders is that the ‘overview’ of the patient’s case is lacking. In this paper, we explore the striving for ‘overview’ among healthcare professionals in cross-sectoral management of type 2 diabetes, with a digital data retrieval system called SAMBLIK. SAMBLIK echoes a well-known story of effortless data flow, hoping to enable digital integration through technological innovation. Based on ethnographical fieldwork and concepts of data work and data experience, we outline a diverse set of ‘uses’ of SAMBLIK that enact different ‘overviews’. We preliminary delineate four enactments: 1) expedient overview, 2) glancing overview, 3) care-continuum overview, and 4) a non-overview. Outlining the multiplicity of SAMBLIK is the first step toward critically evaluating the role of technology in helping data users deal with the paradoxes of experiencing a need for more data along with raising amounts of data work.