The social life of biomedical data: Capturing, obscuring, and envisioning care in the digital safety-net.

Biomedical investment in digital technologies has flooded society with staggering volumes of data, spurring high-tech innovations such as performance metrics, clinical algorithms, and public data dashboards. In examining the social life of data artifacts, scholars draw from actor-network theory to emphasize data's ability to represent social reality while circulating within it, while others suggest formal data models fail to account for invisible relations on the ground. Yet little work has examined the role of human reflexivity in crafting complex human-data configurations in practice, such as how situated human actors relate to data representations within the social reality they intimately know themselves.

Capturing patients, missing inequities: Data standardization on sexual orientation and gender identity across unequal clinical contexts.

In effort to address fundamental causes and reduce health disparities, public programs increasingly mandate sites of care to capture patient data on social and behavioral domains within Electronic Health Records (EHRs). Data reporting drawing from EHRs plays an essential role in public management of social problems, and data on social factors are commonly cited as foundational for eliminating health inequities. Yet one major shortcoming of these data-centered initiatives is their limited attention to social context, including the institutional conditions of biomedical stratification and variation of care provision across clinical settings.