Well-connected systems that safely and ethically share information have a lot of potential to improve care and safety. Due to systems having developed organically and over long periods of time, the reality today is more piecemeal. There are several current initiatives to develop and improve the situation; the main barriers are often managerial or ethical rather than technical. Increasingly, the focus is on moving data out of big silos like hospitals to places where it can be accessed (when appropriate) by others.

British power at India’s northwest and northeast frontiers was only occasionally predicated on categorising and codifying, emanating more often from indeterminacy and upheaval. These were spaces of productive difficulties for colonial administrators, who prized as well as feared the supposed unruliness of uplands and deserts at the state’s fringes. This chapter provides a theoretical outline of how India’s frontiers became spaces of scientific and governmental exception, situating the book’s core arguments in relation to scholarship on power, knowledge, territory, and borderlands. It proposes that although internally fragmented by social structures, terrain, and colonial categories, colonial India’s frontiers took shape through ideational and material connections and comparisons. Following increasingly intense interventions from the later 1860s, by the turn of the twentieth century frontiers were established as crucial spaces of imperial power, science, and self-fashioning.