ABSTRACT

This chapter examines how the conceptions and practices of medicine and healthcare are changing in this context. At least one pharmaceutical industry representative has expressed concerns about the use of the terminology of personalization in medicine. The chapter also examines how discourses of promise, hope and expectation attached to technologies, and specifically digital technologies, shape how the future of medicine and healthcare is imagined and how this, in turn, impacts on policy and investment decisions and the conduct of those who have, or are expected to have, a stake in the imagined future of medicine and healthcare. Digital technologies are finding rapid application in medicine and healthcare, as in other spheres of social life. As A. Koene observes, algorithmic categorization reduces human diversity to discrete social and psychological ‘classes’. One’s software which takes clinical notes and turns them into a standardised vocabulary, meaning that information can be analysed and used in machine learning algorithms and in research and diagnostics.