The Learning Health System as a Socio-Technical System of Translation

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

The governance of life through algorithms and big data, e.g. ‘social sorting’ in automated systems, is a core STS subject. Whilst increasing amounts of personal data (in health, forensics, education, etc.) are generated at scale and deposited in databases, often a comprehensive approach to their analysis, use, and transparent governance remains lacking. This panel contributes to debates on the use of large-scale data agglomeration, analysis, and application in the life sciences, specifically in healthcare, by considering the ways in which STS can inform emergent systems using the example of Learning Health Systems (LHS).
This panel will focus on LHS as a recent reframing of health information infrastructure and health care delivery that promises to leverage the significant amounts of patient and practice-generated data in efforts to reduce costs and medical error, and to improve health outcomes. However, data may be incomplete or proprietary, or may not reflect the realities of the publics they mean to serve thus falling short on the promissory note. This panel explores socio-technical imaginaries of LHS, and considers the role of STS in anticipatory analysis of social and ethical aspects of the emergence of various forms of such systems. The panel will be structured as one session of five speakers presenting empirical work, and one session as a roundtable to consider how STS may reveal the sociotechnical, political and ethical dimensions of emerging LHS and its role, if any, in informing governance.

Sub Unit

• Closed Panels

Individual Presentations

• STS Enters the Imaginary of the Learning Health System: A Discourse Analysis of the Learning Health System in its First Decade - Minakshi Raj, University of Michigan; Jodyn Platt, University of Michigan Medical School; Matthias Wienroth, Policy, Ethics & Life Sciences Research Centre, Newcastle University

• Imagining the Social in a Learning Health System - Alexandra Vinson, University of Michigan

• Bounded Justice: Learning Health Systems and the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge Production - Melissa Creary, University of Michigan, School of Public Health

• Healthcare As A System Of Systems And The Development Of Contingency Plans For Extreme Events - Denis Fischbacher-Smith, University of Glasgow; Bonnie Atonasova, University of Glasgow; Moira Catherine Fischbacher-Smith, University of Glasgow

Session Organizers

• Matthias Wienroth, Policy, Ethics & Life Sciences Research Centre, Newcastle University

• Jodyn Platt, University of Michigan Medical School