Challenges of Data-driven Healthcare Management: New Skills and Work

This conference paper describes the new kind of data-work involved in developing data-driven healthcare based on two cases from Denmark: The first case concerns a governance infrastructure based on Diagnose-Related Groups (DRG), which was introduced in Denmark in the 1990s. The DRG-system links healthcare activity and financing and relies of extensive data entry, reporting and calculations. This has required the development of new skills, work and work roles. The second case concerns a New Governance project aimed at developing new performance indicators for healthcare delivery as an alternative to DRG. Here, a core challenge is select indicators and actually being able to acquire data upon them. The two cases point out that data-driven healthcare requires more and new kinds of work for which new skills, functions and work roles have to be developed.