Patient-generated data as intervention into doctor-patient relationships?

Health data generated by apps and devices are becoming increasingly popular and are expected to affect various aspects of doctor-patient relationships. No longer confined to medically authorised and certified health technologies, a range of biomedical data – from heart rate to blood pressure or oxygen saturation – are captured and processed by consumer health devices. In this article, we compare the practices of physicians and chronically ill patients of integrating, resisting, or neglecting data from popular consumer devices in clinical situations and consider how the data may challenge or reify a doctor’s medical authority. Our study is based on semi-structured interviews with doctors and chronically ill patients in Germany between 2021 and 2023. By contrasting cases from general practice, diabetology, sleep disorder, cardiology, and obesity, we explore when, how, and for what reasons different medical specialists and patients with different chronic illnesses consider patient-generated data (PGD) from consumer devices in clinical situations. While some resist PGD that seem to compete with their diagnostic activities, others incorporate the data more readily into their diagnostic practices. This suggests nuanced strategies for navigating the demarcation between expert and lay knowledge, whereby consumer data can either be ascribed health-relevant meaning or not. ; Von Apps und sog. Devices erzeugte Gesundheitsdaten erfreuen sich zunehmender Beliebtheit und scheinen verschiedene Aspekte der Ärzt:in-Patient:in-Beziehung zu beeinflussen. Nicht mehr auf medizinisch zugelassene und zertifizierte Gesundheitstechnologien beschränkt, werden eine Reihe biomedizinischer Daten – von der Herzfrequenz über den Blutdruck bis hin zur Sauerstoffsättigung – von Gesundheitsgeräten für Verbraucher:innen erfasst und verarbeitet. In diesem Paper vergleichen wir die Praktiken von Ärzt:innen und chronisch kranken Patient:innen im Hinblick auf die Integration, Abwehr oder Vernachlässigung von Daten populärer Verbraucher:innengeräte in ...