The “skillful incompleteness” of digitalization in data hesitant contexts: An Austrian case study

In contemporary health policy, digitalization is frequently imagined as a tool towards more effective and efficient governance. This article presents the case of the digitalization of the maternal and child health program in Austria; specifically, the recent introduction of an electronic maternal and child health record. Our study offers insights into what we label “data hesitancy” and the shape that digital health governance can take in such a context. We ask, how did digitalization emerge as a solution to the problem of maternal and child health, considering longstanding hesitancy towards digital health governance in Austria? We draw on the “What's the problem represented to be?” approach to trace a series of (re)problematizations of maternal and child health across time. Our research is based on an analysis of press releases ( n = 162) and policy documents on the topic of maternal and child health from 1997 to 2023. Here, we examine how different actors problematized maternal and child health and how they came to jointly represent it as a problem that requires the collection, storage, and use of data. We show that digitalization helped to depoliticize contentious issues by foregrounding the technological infrastructures underpinning policy programs and backgrounding disagreements concerning their scope.