Constructing Healthy Data. Data work in healthcare.

In this Introduction, we provide an overview of the twelve papers that comprise this special issue on data work and information systems in the context of healthcare. This collection of papers presents much needed analyses of the practices through which data is produced. We consider data work a socio-technical process where data is shaped and constructed with care to make them integrous and thus ‘healthy.’ The papers make visible a multitude of people working with data to generate, shape, format, interpret, recontextualize, and visualize data. This is the human labour that underlies datafication processes, Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence. Work that is often not noticed but taken for granted. As these papers show, this skilled work should instead be acknowledged and granted resources if efforts to make use of data in healthcare are to succeed.