Tentative renderings: Describing local data infrastructures that support the implementation and evaluation of...

Area of Science:

• Health Services Research
• Data Management
• Qualitative Research Methods

Background:

• Data journeys visualize the lifecycle of data, aiding in understanding data handling and movement.
• The data journeys method offers a framework for analyzing and comparing how data is managed within different contexts.

Purpose of the Study:

• To apply the data journeys method to compare data pathways across various clinical and training programs.
• To identify repetitions, patterns, and gaps in data journeys within a national health system.

Main Methods:

• Conducted qualitative interviews with 43 stakeholders from 21 Enterprise-Wide Initiatives (EWIs) in a US national health system.
• Utilized inductive and deductive coding to identify data journey narratives.
• Developed data journey maps using the swim lane format to visualize and compare data pathways.

Main Results:

• Actors in this study built data infrastructures for evaluating clinical data, differing from prior work focused on managing clinical data.
• Comparison of two data journey maps highlighted variations in data production and management processes.
• Observed how the same information was utilized differently across programs by tracing data pathways and actor interactions.

Conclusions:

• Researchers frequently develop custom data infrastructures tailored to specific evaluation needs.
• Programmatic capabilities influence the type of data infrastructure that can be built, thereby affecting the scope of evaluation work.
• Standardizing quantitative data focus and improving data journey descriptions could enable more refined assessments of complex outcomes across programs.