Data Work of Frontline Care Workers: Practices, Problems, and Opportunities in the Context of Data-Driven Long-Term Care

Using data and data technologies to support healthcare has drawn significant attention recently. While CSCW and HCI have largely celebrated the tremendous promise of ‘data-driven healthcare’ in reforming the healthcare sector, this paper reveals ‘labor-driven reality’ of this promised data-driven future. Drawing from a qualitative study in a real-world data-driven long-term care (LTC) facility in China, we demonstrate how data-driven technologies work in practice, and especially how frontline workers, as the crux of this data-driven configuration, conduct a tremendous amount of “data work” to make data-drivenness work. This data work, we argue, goes beyond the “clerical work” and functions as a labor of maintenance, articulation, and repair, that both guarantees data technologies’ functionalities and acts as an interface between stakeholders. We discuss the properties and impacts of this data work in a boarder socio-cultural context, and highlight how socio-cultural context, perceptions, and existing technologies influence data work practices. Based on these findings, we propose ways to enable more just and ethical data-driven futures.