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Paper short abstract

This paper uses Care Opinion as a case to explore how online patient feedback platforms reshape past experiences of care to stabilise possible healthcare futures. It unpacks the platform’s data practices, highlighting them as ‘meantime practices’ used to craft new chronologies for episodes of care.

Paper long abstract

Online platforms are prevalent in many arenas of life, promising to speed up sociality by compressing the space-time dimensions of interactions using the internet. This includes healthcare, with online patient feedback platforms such as Care Opinion (CO) coupling free-text ‘stories’ of care with datapoints – a “classifying, sorting, slotting, and scaling” practice designed to create effective and timely dialogues between citizen and healthcare service (Fourcade 2021, p.161). In this paper, I build on the argument that platforms use tools to reconfigure relations (Plantin et al. 2018), employing a temporal lens to study CO’s management of multiple coexisting temporalities related to an experience of care. Through interviews with CO staff and story authors, alongside participant-observation, I explore how CO manages multiple forms of ‘meantime’ using techniques such as story tagging, response tracking, and the assignment of ‘criticality scores’ (Masquelier and Durham 2023). High-criticality stories beget longer publication timescales to account for uncertainties – including whether the story relates to a formal complaint. This provides space for the construction of future imaginaries as CO staff attempt to map out possible trajectories of a story following publishing, contrasting with the uniform 5-stage timeline presented to story authors, starting from ‘waiting to be published’ through to ‘change made’ in the linked healthcare service. This contrast foregrounds the chronological politics of CO stories (Tonkin 1992), centring a “routinization of waiting” that attempts to stabilise possible healthcare futures by reshaping past care experiences (Masquelier and Durham 2023, p.9).

Keywords: platforms, healthcare feedback, temporalities, care, experience