Algorithm for Secondary Use of Health Data

Navigating laws relevant to secondary use of health data in Canada can be extremely difficult. I’ve created a decision aid that engages relevant frameworks for Ontario. This tool is currently under development and should not be taken as a substitute for legal advice. As always, legal acceptability should not be taken to equate to social license or normative desirability.

Health Data Spaces in a Global Context: Colloqium in Milan, Italy

This March, the EHDS Forum will be organizing its second meeting and a public colloquium in Milan, Italy, 10-11 March 2026 supported by the EASST Fund.

Newly established health data ecosystems such as the European Health Data Space (EHDS), alongside comparable developments in other global contexts, are increasingly central to contemporary health and innovation policy. While often framed as technical and regulatory infrastructures, these initiatives also constitute full-fledged political projects that reshape relations between citizens, public institutions, and commercial actors.

This colloquium foregrounds key STS and policy themes raised by health data spaces, including questions of social license, public accountability, democratic legitimacy, and public value. It further situates these developments within broader (geo)political dynamics concerning data sovereignty, strategic autonomy, and global power asymmetries. By adopting a comparative and conceptual lens, this colloquium invites critical reflection on the governance, imaginaries, and broader socio-political dynamics underpinning emerging health data ecosystems.

Credit: Benedetta Muda

STS Italia 2025

STA Italia’s 10th Annual Conference “Technoscience for Good: Designing, Caring and Reconfiguring” will be held June 11 - 13 2025 at at Politecnico di Milano. Consider submitting to our open panel Designing Worlds, Worlding Design: The Ethics and Politics of Value Creation in Digital Health and Health Data Integration.

Richard Whitby's The Lost Ones at SALT

This month I had the chance to visit Salt Galata, a contemporary art space occupying a former bank building in the Karaköy district of Istanbul. This work by Richard Whitby titled The Lost Ones was on, showing residency status assessments being carried out by an unforgiving, disembodied voice.

Through dark humour, it highlights the casual violence of bureaucratic processes that increasingly reduce complex lived realities data points and scores, and abstractions of eligibility, compliance, and risk, making visible how technical processes of classification are bound up with questions of belonging and exclusion, highlighting the politics of datafication and its impact on everyday life.