Special issue on information infrastructures for healthcare: The global and local relation

Editorial Special issue on information infrastructures for healthcare: The global and local relation Information infrastructure for healthcare is a particular theoretical perspective that emphasizes the fundamental socio-technical nature of technology and practices. It stipulates that we need to include socio-material relations as part of the entangled infrastructures if we are to comprehend the complexity of information systems within healthcare. relations between patients and various healthcare institutions [2], disease management [14], patient sorting [15], and standardization [6,11], etc. While research within the field of healthcare information infrastructure is diverse, it is based upon some universal assumptions about information infrastructure: (a) it is embedded within social arrangements and technologies, (b) it is transparent in use by invisibly supporting routine tasks and activities, (c) it is spatial and temporal in scope – since the infrastructure might reach beyond single local sites and across time – (d) it is the embodiment of standards, and finally, (e) it only becomes visible during breakdowns [9, p. 35]. Clearly, information infrastructures in healthcare form many different entities, and it is within this field that researchers examine the precise nature of the various infrastructures that hold healthcare practices together. Although no journals dedicated exclusively to the field of information infrastructure for healthcare, the research community has been publishing in a range of very different venues. Based on a workshop dedicated to this topic, Bansler and Winthereik edited a special issue of the International Journal of Integrated Care [19]. In 2009, Bansler and Kensing organized the 2nd International Workshop on Information Infrastruc-tures for Healthcare, which formed the basis for a special issue of the journal Computer Supported Cooperative Work [5] focus-ing on the connection between practices across institutional and professional boundaries. These workshops and special issues helped foster an emerging international research community focusing on information infrastructures in healthcare. In the same period, and addressing perspectives and issues overlapping with the above initiatives, the International Journal of Medical Informatics published two special issues: one on socio-technical approaches [1], and another on collaborative practices [17]. Thus, this current special issue of the International Journal of Medical Informatics adds to a strand of research within IJMI and it puts special focus on the links and relations between the local and the global in information infrastructures for health-care. With local/global we refer to a distinction between the concrete practical circumstances of work in, for example, a small clinic (the local) and how …