ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a critical examination of how digital health platforms transform the current healthcare system and medical knowledge generation through assembling patient experiences at different levels involving diverse actors and yielding various outcomes. First, a review will be provided on the transformation and evolution of information seeking and sharing health data online, to datafication of this anecdotal sharing for medical knowledge generation via alternative business models, often spawning platform businesses, ranging from cooperative to intensely profit-seeking. Such changes also open up wider possibilities of post-consumer, post-corporate forms of organizing our world with the help of digital technologies. Performativity as an analytical lens will be used to articulate how patient experiences are assembled and the complexity of interactions between human and non-human actors in these assemblages and critically assess the multi-level outcomes these assemblages produce in and beyond different digital health platforms (e.g., PatientsLikeMe, Raremark). Remarks on the impact of platformization on healthcare market dynamics will also be shared.
