Healthcare and Health Research
Healthcare and Health Research
This chapter focuses on the platformization of the health sector. A burgeoning field of online health platforms has emerged, ranging from personal fitness apps to medical platforms that are used by patients, doctors, and researchers. A global industry of health-related platforms is being stacked onto, and interwoven with, the infrastructural core of the ecosystem; developing sectoral health platforms is a potentially lucrative and data-rich area that major operators are keen to invest in. Examining health platforms, the chapter unravels a peculiar double-edged logic in how their benefit is argued: they offer personalized data-driven services to their customers, while simultaneously serving an overarching public interest in medical research, the outcomes of which ostensibly benefit everyone. Using the platform mechanisms as an analytical prism, the chapter scrutinizes three single platforms, which are illustrative of the health sector: 23andMe, PatientsLikeMe, and Parkinson mPower.
Keywords: health, fitness app, health-and-sickness platform, 23andMe, PatientsLikeMe, Parkinson mPower, open data, open science
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