E-Infrastructures and the divergent assetization of public health data: Expectations, uncertainties, and asymmetries

Vezyridis, Paraskevas; Timmons, Stephen

Abstract

Normative, scientific and economic pledges to Electronic Health Record (EHR) data-driven research (for health and wealth) attempt to reconfigure public health data as an asset for realising multiple values across healthcare, research and finance. In this paper, we examine some of the expectations, frictions and uncertainties involved with the assetisation of de-identified NHS patient data by (primary care) research services in UK. We introduce the concept of 'asymmetric assetisation divergence' to study the various practices of configuring and using this data, both as a continuously generated resource to be extracted and as an asset to be circulated in the knowledge economy. As data assetisation and exploitations grow bigger and more diverse, the capitalisation of these datasets may constitute EHR data-driven research in healthcare as an attractive technoscientific activity, but one limited to those actors with specific sociotechnical resources in place to fully exploit them at the required scale.

Citation

Vezyridis, P., & Timmons, S. (2021). E-Infrastructures and the divergent assetization of public health data: Expectations, uncertainties, and asymmetries. Social Studies of Science, 51(4), 606-627. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312721989818

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jul 6, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Jan 27, 2021
• Publication Date: Aug 1, 2021
• Deposit Date: Jul 13, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 27, 2021
• Journal: Social Studies of Science
• Print ISSN: 0306-3127
• Electronic ISSN: 1460-3659
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 51
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 606-627
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312721989818
• Keywords: History and Philosophy of Science; General Social Sciences; History
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/4766115
• Publisher URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0306312721989818