Advancing to the Next Level: The Quantified Professional-Self and the Gamification of Physicians and Scientists

 The digitization of healthcare does not only affect patients, but also healthcare practitioners whose performance are increasingly being measured and, subsequently, displayed in graphs, flow charts and benchmarks (e.g. number of post-surgical infections, scores on teaching competences). These measurements and visualizations have much in common with digital devices used for self-monitoring of health, work and leisure (Lupton 2016; Ruckenstein and Pantzar 2015). Next to imposed quantification practices, physicians themselves employ digitization and quantification practices like using Twitter and Facebook to build heterogeneous networks of patients, fellow-clinicians and klout scores to expand networks, display individual performance, evoke new ways of care giving, and compete on popularity. Similar patterns are seen in science, where measures of scholarly impact based on online activity (e.g. ResearchGate) are used to study and assess the impact of research– constituting the quantified academic-self. In this paper, we use Johan Huizinga’s notion of play (Huizinga 1955) and Peter Sloterdijk’s concept of self-betterment (Sloterdijk 2014) to explore how physicians and scientists alike enact digital technologies as liberating
instruments and taking control over one’s own (self)evaluation and self-presentation as a way of gamification (Hammerfelt et al. 2016). The paper is based on a comparative analysis of several projects in healthcare and academic practices focusing on the (numerical) evaluation of professional work in which we have focused on how quantifying practices are used by professionals in order to perform identity and care/research work.