Adjusting expectations actionable: Personalised treatment plan in anticipation of data-driven healthcare

Abstract

Our paper is a case study of the making of data-driven healthcare and anticipation work done by developer-experts in a project for implementation of an integrated patient data management platform in Finland. We focus on ‘personalised treatment plan’, a trope that experts regularly use when talking about the objectives of data management reform and their wishes for datafication of healthcare. We conceive of the personalised plan not primarily as a future vision or an outcome, but rather a tool of anticipation of work. Our analysis demonstrates two purposes for which the developer-experts used this tool. First, the plan enabled them to reconfigure the general expectations of datafication actionable and adoptable in the actual world of healthcare and to articulate datafication technology-to-come as concrete hopes and wishes, plans and assessments in the contexts of clinical practices and administration. Second, experts used the idea of a personalised plan for reasoning over and management of their own work. Among the fuzziness and commotion of the complex project, the plan helped them to create and maintain a workable order between the expectations, tasks and functions that the datafication technology should accomplish in healthcare in the future. Furthermore, we discuss the limitations of anticipation to take the specific political and economic contexts into account, which made the developers unprepared for the political interruption of the project.