The value of experience: A historical sociology of data‑driven health care systems

One of the key expectations associated with health data is their potential ability to make health systems more reactive, adaptable (“smart”) and efficient by integrating patient generated information into the digital infrastructure of these systems. One of the key technologies to bring this expectation to bear are Patient Reported Outcomes Measures (PROMs). PROMs are metrics of how patients feel and function from their own perspective. Focusing on the emergence of PROMs, this article draws on the social studies of quantification to understand how “subjective data” came to be the driving force behind change in contemporary health systems. It suggests that a co-productive interaction between efficiency-focused models of healthcare organisation and an epistemic framing of health as a computational problem is the sociotechnical core of data-driven health care systems.