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This article examines how digital epidemiology and eHealth coalesce into a powerful health surveillance system that fundamentally changes present notions of body and health. In the age of Big Data and Quantified Self, the conceptual and practical distinctions between individual and population body, personal and public health, surveillance and health care are diminishing. Expanding on Armstrong’s concept of “surveillance medicine” to “quantified self medicine” and drawing on my own research on the symbolic power of statistical constructs in medical encounters, this article explores the impact of digital health surveillance on people’s perceptions, actions and subjectivities. It discusses the epistemic confusions and paradoxes produced by a health care system that increasingly treats patients as risk profiles and prompts them to do the same, namely to perceive and manage themselves as a bundle of health and security risks. Since these risks are necessarily constructed in reference to epidemiological data that postulate a statistical gaze, they also construct or make-up disembodied “individuals on alert”.

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This paper examines the ways in which healthcare providers from a mixed economy of welfare operating in superdiverse neighbourhoods connect and innovate across the healthcare ecosystem to meet diverse and complex needs. Moving beyond a health systems approach which siloes different types of provision we use the concept of bricolage to make visible the work undertaken by providers across the ecosystem. While we show that public, private and civil society provision all adapt to meet complex and diverse needs to some degree, we highlight the importance of inter-connectedness between providers and note the role of civil society in addressing gaps and cracks in provision. The importance of adopting a whole ecosystem approach and focusing on the actions and interactions which enable the ecosystem to function in complex demographic environments is highlighted before we stress the dangers of over-reliance on civil society.