The Quantified Doctor/Nurse: How Quantification Infrastructures ‘redo’ Care

Abstract

This paper explores how accountability metrics are enacted in unfolding healthcare practices. We examine the socio-technical infrastructures that underpin and enable quantification of care, and how users of quantified data not only react to quantitative practices and underlying infrastructures, but also actively give shape to them through practices of gamification. In the paper, we elucidate three ways of gamification: adjusting to quantification infrastructures, ignoring quantification infrastructures, and playing with quantification infrastructures. Such games, we show, are played within the context of, and give shape to emerging infrastructures of measuring healthcare. This opens up to a diversity of ontological practices in relation to quantification infrastructures, as well as to unfolding identities of the professional quantified self.