MeST seminar: Promises and paradoxes of data-driven healthcare

Programme

  • Non-coherence in control medicine: Notes on the making of data-driven healthcare

Professor Ilpo Helen, University of Eastern Finland

  • Data Paradoxes: The Politics of Intensified Data Sourcing in Contemporary Healthcare

Professor Klaus Hoeyer, University of Copenhagen

  • Followed by discussion on promises and paradoxes of data-driven healthcare

 

Abstracts

Non-coherence in control medicine: Notes on the making of data-driven healthcare

Ilpo Helen, University of Eastern Finland

In my studies on the pursuits for personalized medicine, more extensive ‘secondary use’ of healthcare and social service data reservoirs, and planning and implementation of integrated healthcare data management ‘platforms’ at national and regional levels in Finland, I came to think of the emergence of a specific idea of medical care at the heart of the making of future medicine. Following Gilles Deleuze’s remarks on control society I call this emerging mode ‘control medicine’, which refers to medical care as constant anticipatory monitoring of personal risks, treatment and its outcomes, and lifestyle ‘factors’, and making subtle, individually tailored interventions in living and vital functions of the person and populations. In my talk, I will first focus on the features and implications of control medicine as it appears in the plans and projects for datafication of healthcare in Finland. Secondly, I will concentrate on the frictions of data-driven control medicine and its making. In the visions and blueprints, data management systems and control in prevention, clinical work, administration, and logistics of healthcare work smoothly and seamlessly; but in the eyes of an ethnographer and historian the scenery seems to be more complex, messy, and incomplete.

Data Paradoxes: The Politics of Intensified Data Sourcing in Contemporary Healthcare

Klaus Hoeyer, University of Copenhagen

In contemporary healthcare, everybody seems to want more data, of higher quality, on more people, and to use this data for a wider range of purposes. In theory, such pervasive data collection should lead to a healthcare system in which data can quickly, efficiently, and unambiguously be interpreted and provide better care for patients, more efficient administration, enhanced options for research, and accelerated economic growth. In practice, however, data are difficult to interpret and the many purposes often undermine one another. Focusing on Denmark, a world leader in healthcare data infrastructures, Hoeyer shares the perspectives of different stakeholders, from epidemiologists to hospital managers, from patients to physicians, analyzing the social dynamics set in motion by data intensification and calling special attention to that which cannot be easily coded in a database.

Venue

29 September 2022, 12.00-13.30

Brown bag seminar (bring your lunch)

Room 33.1.18, CSS campus, Øster Farimagsgade 5A (Building 33, see map here)