Nurses Data Work as an Entry Point for Exploring how Bias is Considered in Practice

This paper investigates what characterises nurses' data work, documentation practices and coordination in care work. The study acts as an entry point for qualitatively exploring how nurses deal with and navigate bias in practice. What is critical data and documentation from nurses' perspective as part of caring for their patients and how do they consider bias? These questions are investigated ethnographically (67h of observations) in two Danish hospital wards that use a Data-driven Electronic Health Records (EHR) for nurses' documentation. Emerging data-driven EHRs work as platforms allowing for data extraction as well as easier access to merging data streams. A particular concern about data extraction is bias, which can enter EHRs through nurses' documentation. The study finds that nurses deal with bias as a matter of how they report data that are related to sensitive information about patients, such as culture or social status. This suggests a dilemma of importance for the design of EHRs when data work becomes policy.