Healthcare, like other critical infrastructures, has becoming increasingly reliant on and organised through digital technologies, digital data, AI, machine learning and algorithm-based decision-making. Great hopes and expectations are being associated with the deployment of data and digital arrangements for improved diagnosis and treatment, but also medical research, drug development, public health policy, and health­care administration. Whether these hopes materialise and what social challenges and implications these developments involve, however, is currently a matter of contestation. This workshop explores the inter­re­lations between digitalisation, datafication and the reconfigu­ration of social relationships, practices and institutional structures in healthcare. We ask: What is critical about the digitalisation and datafication of health­care? What are matters of concern from a social science perspec­tive? We will look at the perspectives and expectations of different stakeholders, the tensions between different purposes of health data collection, the implications of AI and machine learning for medical practice, knowledge production, and the meaning of health and illness, the question how digitalisation and datafication affect the relationships between doctor and patient, treatment and research, healthcare and IT professions, the public and the private sector, and the ethical and gover­nance issues arising in this context.

Workshop takes place on November 14th 2022, 10.00-17.00.

Registration and further information: sayed-mehdi.mousavian@sowi.uni-stuttgart.de

More information can be found here.