This paper investigates the often neglected area of data work by medical secretaries, specifically in the context of hospitals in Denmark. Since the 1930s medical secretaries have played a steadily more central role in meeting the growing need for health data. With electronic health records (EHRs) and promises of data automation, the profession has been put at risk of redundancy. While there is a considerable base of research on the datafication of health care, the data work emerging from datafication remains undescribed. Hence, we are conducting a socio-technical study of clinical-administrative data work in contemporary Danish public hospitals. In this paper we present early insights of this research, indicating the vital role of medical secretaries’ data work in securing clinical information at the point of care.

Real-time control of urban drainage networks requires knowledge about stored volumes and flows in order to predict overflows and optimize system operation. However, using flow sensors inside the pipelines means prohibitively high installation and maintenance costs. In this article, we formulate two nonlinear, constrained estimation problems for identifying the open-channel flow in urban drainage networks. To this end, we distribute cost-efficient level sensors along the pipelines and formulate the estimation problems based on the spatiallydiscretized kinematic and diffusion wave approximations of the full Saint-Venant partial differential equations. To evaluate the capabilities of the two models, the two approaches are compared and evaluated on modeling a typical phenomenon occurring in drainage systems: the backwater effect. An extensive realworld experiment demonstrates the effectiveness of the two approaches in obtaining the model parameters on a scaled water laboratory setup, in the presence of measurement noise.

Mobile applications targeting people engaged in physical activity have increased. However, while research has identified social support as a key factor for people’s engagement in physical activity, most mobile health (mHealth) applications are designed for individual use. In this paper, we report on a research study exploring opportunities for designing mHealth to facilitate social support around physical activity. A mHealth application was designed, and pilot tested for eight weeks with healthcare professionals (n = 3) and two groups of citizens (n = 20) who were motivated but challenged physically due to various health conditions. Data was collected via online monitoring of the use of the mHealth application during the pilot test and via qualitative interviews with the participants before and after. The results support the idea that designing for social health support is important but so is identifying key challenges related to (i) the facilitation of technology-mediated social health support, especially to a target group that is living with health challenges, and (ii) finding a balance between social and health agendas that bring social support to the foreground for the participants.

Through a qualitative study in six hospital departments in the Northern Region of Denmark, this article aims to shed light on how a non-clinical group, medical secretaries, supports clinical-administrative documentation as they translate between the clinical and administrative domains. This article shows how this demands context-sensitive knowledge and skills acquired through deep engagement with the full scope of clinical-administrative work at the department level. We argue that, given the increasing ambitions for secondary uses of healthcare data, specific clinical-administrative competencies beyond those of clinicians are increasingly necessary in the skillmix in hospitals.

No abstract