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

Abstract

In this article, we examine some of the expectations, frictions and uncertainties involved with the assetization of de-identified NHS patient data by (primary care) research services in UK. Pledges to Electronic Health Record (EHR) data-driven research attempt to reconfigure public health data as an asset for realizing multiple values across healthcare, research and finance. We introduce the concept of ‘asymmetrical divergence’ in public health data assetization 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 assetization and exploitations grow bigger and more diverse, the capitalization 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.