Silent Data, Active Patients

Overview & Synopsis

With the wake of digital welfare, governments advocate that patients play an active role in managing their own illnesses. This active role is sustained by access to and use of health data provided by health care authorities through new digital technologies. Stepping into an empirical site where patients log in to their own site, ‘MyChart’, we inquire their practices reading health care data and their imaginaries about active involvement in their own health care. With this, our analysis focuses on the active patient and aims to bring forth local imaginaries in an effort to nuance data imaginaries located in political strategies, which relate data access with active partnerships. Within this, we illustrate how patients are active, while data is silent and in need of work before it vocals meaningful for the patients.