The gaming healthcare practitioner: How practices of datafication and gamification reconfigure care

Abstract

This article explores how datafication, as an increasing use of quantified performance data (e.g. performance indicators, rating sites), and social media are enacted in everyday healthcare practice. Drawing on the literature about the quantified self, this article shows that datafication evokes practices of gamification: the application of frames of play and rewards to the healthcare setting. We discern three (intermingling) practices of gamification: adapting, ignoring and changing. ‘Adapting’ refers to the incorporation of quantifying features in healthcare, while ‘ignoring’ sheds light on how practitioners seek to circumvent quantifying mechanisms. Change refers to how practitioners actually embrace quantifying mechanisms in order to extend (and improve) their work and to highlight their quantified professional self. We elucidate how datafication of healthcare ‘opens up’ and reconfigures established practices of organizing care and caring – not only for the patient but also to (re)craft the professional clinical identity.