Human-data interaction in healthcare: acknowledging use-related chasms to design for a better health information

In this paper, we focus on an emerging strand of IT-oriented research, namely Human-Data Interaction (HDI) and on how this can be applied to healthcare. HDI regards both how humans create and use data by means of interactive systems, which can both assist and constrain them, as well as to passively collect and proactively generate data. Healthcare is a challenging arena to test the potential of HDI towards a new, user-centered perspective on how to support and assess data work, especially in current times where data are becoming increasingly big and many tools are available for the lay people, including doctors and nurses, to interact with health-related data. This paper is a contribution in the direction of considering healthcare data through the lens of HDI, and of framing data visualization tools in this strand of research, in order to let the subtler peculiarities among different kind of data and of their use emerge and be addressed accordingly. Our point is that doing so can promote the design of more usable tools that can support data work from a user-centered and data quality perspective.