“…Even isolating "direct clinical face time" 1 in single encounters would neglect the individual doctors' need to take written notes of encounters so conditions and interpretations can be recalled during future encounters 9 and, in so doing, formulate an understanding of the evolution of the patient's illness and collaborate with themselves (at least) over time. 10 Decoupling clinical and data work is even more futile in hospital work, which is cooperative by nature. For instance, physicians' prescriptions cannot be decoupled by order entry since the cooperative effort to administer a treatment to a patient needs specific data to be articulated within a record, which both mediates and enables asynchronous communication and collaboration between physicians and nurses, so as to act as the distributed and working record described by Fitzpatrick 11 and Bardram and Bossen, 12 among others, for example, by Greenhalgh et al 13 In this article, we will focus on the inscribing side of data work in the medical domain, or data recording work, and in particular on one aspect of the activities in which physicians and nurses make a textual (or anyway coded) representation of some clinically relevant aspect pertaining to the illness of a patient on either paper or an electronic medium, for any of the reasons mentioned above, usually to trigger further action, reflection, and decision-making.…”