Subject of innovation or : how to redevelop 'the patient' with technology

Abstract

Michel Foucault’s work concerned ‘subjectivation’. Contemporary critics argue that his work on ‘surveillance societies’ is based on the industrial organisation paradigm. In the information era, his surveillance model is said to be defunct. One way of assessing the value of Foucault’s work for present-day concerns is to examine how ‘subjectivation’ relates to technology. His own research on neoliberalism provides a starting-point. We do need to look further though, for example at Bruno Latour’s work, which claims that technologies are to people what ‘plug-ins’ are to the internet. The question is how technology-mediated subjectivation turns out in practice. This study examines the case of healthcare innovation from the point of view of ‘shaping’ the patient. The Dutch Electronic Health Record and the Personal Healthcare Budget are political designs to foster innovation. Both designs were introduced in the mid-1990s and were nearly abolished in 2011. What happened over the course of one and a half decades? The study concludes by examining the democratisation of healthcare innovation in ‘Living Labs’: local or regional platforms in which people are in some way involved in innovation processes. Again, the crucial question is: what roles are attributed to the patient?