Becoming Data-Driven. Exploring data work and tensions in healthcare data journeys.

Encouraged by the vast amounts of data produced in healthcare, political ambitions to make healthcare data-driven have led to significant investments in infrastructures. This paper explores how healthcare professionals work with data and infrastructure to pursue data-driven ambitions in regional hospital departments. Drawing on the concept of ‘data journeys’ (Leonelli, 2020), I examine how data are produced, processed, mobilized, and repurposed through Business Intelligence tools and a data warehouse. Based on qualitative interviews and fieldwork, I identify three central forms of data work: reconfiguring data infrastructures, managing data quality in practice, and visualizing and recontextualizing data. My findings show that data journeys are not linear, but cyclical, negotiated, and shaped by infrastructural constraints, professional judgment, and institutional tensions. These tensions, which are conceptualized as breakdowns, ontological ambiguity, and disputes, are not mere disruptions, but significant to how data becomes actionable. Lastly, I introduce the concept of the ‘productive paradox of error’ to capture how error management generates new epistemic and ontological work, and positions tensions as generative forces in healthcare professionals’ pursuit of becoming data-driven.