Datafying the Patient Voice

This chapter discusses the temporality and moral ambiguity of healthcare activism and state-sanctioned empowerment by providing examples from the infrastructuring of Danish healthcare. Denmark is a classic Nordic welfare state. It builds on models of collaborative government, provides universal access to healthcare to Danish citizens, and it operates a particular form of data-intensive service delivery said to be citizen-centric. For years, Denmark has pioneered public digitalization and participatory methods such as user-driven innovation and citizen involvement in medical technology assessments. The rights and duties embedded within the welfare edifice serve as reminders of earlier activism and solidified forms of collaboration. The chapter explores how patients are engaged in new forms of health data production and how various forms of activism affect public digital data infrastructures, emphasizing the involved moral and epistemological ambiguity of these attempts to affect data flows. Welfare infrastructures evolve through such processes of promise, ruination, and repair.