The Program in Technology, Data, and Health seeks to understand the complex role of diagnostic, therapeutic, and preventive devices in changing the definitions of health and illness, while focusing attention on the increasing role that information technology takes on in mediating access to care in past, present, and future.
Drawing from faculty and trainees across the School of Medicine, the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, and the Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Program encourages interdisciplinary collaborations to empirically analyze and re-theorize the relationship between technology and health in contemporary moment that increasingly proposes data as a solution to health problems. Drawing on a diverse array of methods from history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, clinical medicine, epidemiology, and medical informatics, this network of scholars insisted on the urgency of recognizing that the impact of technology on health and medicine can never be divorced from social context. With the support of a Sawyer Award from the Mellon Foundation on “Precision and Uncertainty in a World of Data”, the Program has helped to co-sponsor several workshops on the role of medical technology in eliminating or in exacerbating existing health disparities, the urgency of examining racial, ethnic, gender, and class biases built into algorithmic models of care, the evolving roles of electronic systems in medical practice, the commodification of health data, the increasing role of sensors and wearable devices, the nascent “do-it-yourself” (DIY) and “open-source” approaches to health technologies, and the elusive promises of precision medicine.