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Paper short abstract

Drawing on the studies of promissory futures around digitalization and my ongoing ethnography at the Dutch outpatient hospital, I explore how healthcare professionals and hospital decision-makers navigate the tensions between promised datafied futures and the under-repair present.

Paper long abstract

STS research on promissory futures around digitalization and AI have demonstrated their performative power in structuring action and setting agendas in the present (Oomen, 2022). While these techno-optimistic visions of desirable futures often rely on narratives of technological breakthroughs and immediacy, research shows that the transition to data-driven healthcare is often accompanied by delays and postponement (Choroszewicz, 2024; Hoeyer, 2023), and invisible work (Green et al., 2023). Drawing on this literature and my ongoing ethnographic study at the Dutch outpatient hospital, I explore how healthcare professionals and hospital decision-makers navigate the tensions between promised futures and the under-repair present.

This paradox manifested in the futuristic narrative around AI technologies to improve healthcare efficiency. The newly introduced “chat with your doctor” hospital app feature caused a lot of concerns among professionals, who felt overwhelmed by patient messages. Despite difficulties in the present, some physicians hoped that more advanced tools, like personalized AI-powered assistants, would resolve the problem in the future. Similar hopes were expressed by the chief pharmacist, who was involved in developing an LLM for medicine verification to address the shortages of pharmacists at the hospital. Despite acknowledging the hurdles of model development and usability concerns, she still believed that technological advances in the near future will solve the current issues. In my presentation, I will draw on these and related examples to shed light on how hopes for datafied healthcare futures co-exist with emerging tensions in the present.