I’m Trying to Find my Way of Staying Organized: the Socio-Technical Assemblages of Personal Health Information Management

Abstract

Personal health information management (PHIM) is a broad endeavor that requires the patient to navigate many different types of information. Including patients performing a variety of tasks and roles to make information useful. I ask the question: what practices constitute a patient’s personal health information management socio-technical assemblage? By doing this I am interested in understanding how PHIM is an assemblage of different actors, tools, technologies, information, and materialities that form a heterogeneous network to motivate the patient’s health maintenance and wellbeing. I describe information practices, planning and sense making practices that patients engage to begin to define this assemblage, and the social actors and materialities that manifest and stabilize. Then, I discuss three key commitments learned from this approach, namely: the personal aspect of PHIM, the role of physical and digital materials on PHIM, and the role of information practice materialities.