License to Heal: Understanding a Healthcare Platform Organization as a Multi-Level Surveillant Assemblage

Abstract

Platform organizations bring renewed attention to power disparities and risks in the rise of surveillance capitalism. However, such critical accounts provide a partial understanding of the complexity of surveillance phenomena in such shifting socio-technical and digital environments. The findings from a netnographic investigation of a healthcare platform organization, PatientsLikeMe, unravel how platforms become the locus where multi-level flows of surveillance converge, thereby constituting what we identify as a surveillant assemblage. We develop a comprehensive approach for understanding how platforms constitute a dynamic crossroads of micro-, meso- and macro-surveillance phenomena within and beyond the online communities they create. This study highlights this surveillant assemblage’s emerging practices and potentially empowering outcomes that enable multi-stakeholder involvement in big data and knowledge generation in healthcare. Broader implications of multi-level surveillance in and through platforms are discussed.

Overcoming Challenges for Improved Patient-Centric Care: A Scoping Review of Platform Ecosystems in Healthcare

“…While digital technology has revolutionized the traditional modes of health service delivery [56], improving healthcare access and patient outcomes [57], reducing costs [23], [58], and overall healthcare efficiency [59], the evolution of ecosystems is yet to be fully witnessed in healthcare.…”

“…Digital technologies in healthcare range from tools and platforms, including electronic health records (EHR), mobile medicine, healthcare applications, wearable devices, artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and data analytics [23], [29], [56], [58]. These platforms provide patients with several functions, such as online consulting, information support, routine monitoring, and access to healthcare [56].…”

“…These platforms provide patients with several functions, such as online consulting, information support, routine monitoring, and access to healthcare [56]. For care providers, the platforms present an opportunity to interact, exchange information, and co-create value [23], [56], [60]. Given its immense potential, Ding et al [56] have estimated the growth of digital products and services to a market share of 12% within the healthcare industry.…”

“…Others have focused on barriers towards adoption and usage, e.g. [23]- [27] highlighted critical issues such as privacy, security and interoperability concerns. However, this present understanding of the potential healthcare applications of PEs and the challenges they may encounter related to successful implementation in other industries, such as automobile, ICT, and e-commerce, is yet to drive substantive progress in the healthcare sector.…”

Unlearning organized numbness through poetic synesthesia: A study in scarlet

“…Blood appears to be at the heart of complex ontological politics leading to the (tense) reification and enactment of blood through various organizational day-to-day practices (Wittock et al, 2019). Anyone who has been hospitalized, who has hemorrhaged, been transfused or is suffering from a blood-borne disease can testify to the organizational complexity of blood—that as patients we are often excluded from accessing (Vicdan et al, 2022), and that as corpses, we are emptied of in order to be studied (Mol and Law, 1994: 642).…”