Patients as infrastructure: The case of MyChart

• In Event: Welfare After Digitalisation: Siting values, affordances, and politics

Abstract

During 2016 and 2017, the hospitals in the Capital and Zealand regions in Denmark implemented a new IT system, the Health Platform (Sundhedsplatformen), which integrates the patient portal, MyChart (Min Sundhedsplatform). The patient portal provides patients the possibility to communicate in writing with their doctor, and it allows them to read a majority of their own patient record and access test results. When healthcare becomes digital, it brings new modes of care delivery as well as transformations of doctor-patient roles. In the Danish political strategies for digital healthcare, patients are, for instance, seen as active partners, and digital technologies are promoted as enablers of patient involvement and self-care. Such strategies call upon patients as part of the infrastructure for care delivery. Taking MyChart as a case example, this project seeks to understand how patients and healthcare professionals experience and navigate digital health infrastructures, and, in turn, unfold which transformations digitalisation brings about. In addition, the project investigates the imagined futures embedded in policy documents for digital health care. The paper will focus on mapping out the many different ways in which MyChart embeds an active patient.

Author

• Cæcilie Sloth Laursen, IT University of Copenhagen