Making Health Data into an Epistemic Consumption Object: An Israeli Case-Study

• In Event: Speculation and Innovation in Digital Health - II

Abstract

Recent years have seen the emergence of markets for digital health data: the collection and circulation of data and its rendering into commodities. In this paper we examine the key role of Israeli state agencies implementing a program for the advancement of digital health in the epistemic construction of health data as a consumption object. By assuming the unproblematic existence of digital health data as a given entity, the program operates as a fundamental discursive mechanism for the creation of this very object. This is done by three main epistemic operations:
1. The construction of digital health data as a resource for medical knowledge and for the creation of economic value. This involves discursive practices of imagining, naming and making usable the epistemic consumption object which needs to be created: digital health data.
2. The construction of an assemblage of actants required to make digital data registered, accumulated and circulated. This is a work of connecting organizations, knowledges and devices, in order to create that one thing which is at the center of the project but is still absent – digital health data; an object to be materialized through its position in the assemblage.
3. The boundary work needed to constitute algorithmic knowledge as a valid foundation for medical practices and health policies.
These epistemic operations do not merely digitize an existing object (clinical information), but rather are engaged in the constitution of a new epistemology, involving radically different theories, methodologies, devices and practices which draws most prominently on data science.

Authors

• Eran Fisher, Open University of Israel

• Zeev Rosenhek, Open University of Israel