‘Is this something I should be worried about?’: A study of nurses' recontextualisation work when making clinical decisions based on patient reported outcome data

Rikke Torenholt and Tine Tjørnhøj-Thomsen

Social Science & Medicine, 2022, vol. 294, issue C

Abstract: As clinical care practices are becoming more digitalised, information about patients is increasingly being encoded as quantified data, and the processes of sorting data are often supported by algorithmic computations. One such practice becoming more prevalent across Western countries is the clinical use of Patient Reported Outcome (PRO) data. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in a Danish setting among nurses managing PRO-based breast cancer follow-up, we examine how clinical decisions are made on the basis of PRO-data and what this requires from the nurses. By applying the concept of recontextualisation work as an analytical perspective, we shed light on the efforts of nurses when mobilising complementary information about patients in order to recontextualise the otherwise decontextualised data, thereby giving data practical value in clinical decision-making. Recontextualisation work, we show, is shaped by organisational structure, available resources, and nurses' professional capacity. Drawing analytical attention to the work of recontextualisation allows for a nuanced understanding of the efforts required to make data workable and hence what it takes to carry out clinical decisions in today's datafied healthcare system.

Keywords: Recontextualisation work; Data work; Patient reported outcomes; Clinical decision-making; Clinical decision support; Cancer follow-up care (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114645

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