Healthcare is increasingly datafied, and a wide range of actors—patients, clinicians, administrators, policymakers, and industry lobbyists—want to be able to exchange and access health data internationally and use them for an increasing number of purposes. Therefore, competing initiatives aimed at fostering international data integration proliferate, with the proposed European Health Data Space as one of the most prominent examples. But how do legislators conceptualize a health data space? And what could they gain from rethinking the governmental object of this legislation? To explore these questions, we suggest taking the term “data space,” present in the European Health Data Space initiative, and develop it theoretically to establish a vocabulary fit for understanding international data-intensive health environments. Space is a concept with appealing affordances. It is a way of naming a mode of being which is simultaneously symbolic and material, abstract and concrete, social and physical. We show how these affordances of the concept of space can be helpful when exploring new ways of living in cross-border data-intensive healthcare settings. Whereas policy reports often describe data sharing as a matter of providing technical means and legal provisions to “wire together” existing data resources, we argue that data spaces should be understood as sociotechnical constructs enacted through three formative and four experiential dimensions.

中文翻译：

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数据空间中的健康：跨境健康数据共享的形成和体验维度

医疗保健日益数据化，广泛的参与者——患者、临床医生、管理者、政策制定者和行业游说者——希望能够在国际范围内交换和访问健康数据，并将其用于越来越多的目的。因此，旨在促进国际数据整合的竞争性举措激增，拟议的欧洲健康数据空间就是最突出的例子之一。但立法者如何概念化健康数据空间呢？他们从重新思考这项立法的政府目标中可以获得什么？为了探讨这些问题，我们建议采用欧洲健康数据空间倡议中提出的术语“数据空间”，并从理论上对其进行发展，以建立适合理解国际数据密集型健康环境的词汇表。空间是一个具有吸引力的概念。它是一种命名存在模式的方式，这种存在模式同时具有象征性和物质性、抽象性和具体性、社会性和物理性。我们展示了这些空间概念的可供性如何有助于探索跨境数据密集型医疗保健环境中的新生活方式。尽管政策报告经常将数据共享描述为提供技术手段和法律规定以将现有数据资源“连接在一起”，但我们认为数据空间应被理解为通过三个形成维度和四个体验维度制定的社会技术构造。