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Healthcare platform companies and (dis-)embedding strategies: restructuring the Swedish public primary care
Karlstad University, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (starting 2013), Department of Geography, Media and Communication (from 2013).ORCID iD: 0000-0003-1592-6079
2025 (English)In: Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, ISSN 0435-3684, E-ISSN 1468-0467Article in journal (Refereed) Epub ahead of print
Abstract [en]

While research on the platform economy is thriving, platform companies operating in the public sphere remain understudied. The present article contributes to narrow this research gap, by analysing the emergence of healthcare platform companies (HPCs, hereafter) in the Swedish public healthcare sector. HPCs provide app-based consultations, matching healthcare professionals with patients. These are relatively new private for-profit actors that are restructuring the geography of the Swedish public primary care. The paper deploys the notion of (dis-)embeddedness to analyse HPCs' expansion strategies, foregrounding two interrelated aspects. First, how HPCs territorially (dis-)embed in/from Regions to maximize reimbursement from public finances, using a parallel system of primary care financing by providing app-based consultations at the national scale. Second, how HPCs simultaneously embed in transnational networks of speculative capital, raising investments to offset losses and fund further expansion. Drawing on critical platform and digital data studies, this article examines how the speculative valorization of data, extracted via app-based service provision and central to valuation processes of platform companies, can account for HPCs' rapid expansion despite sustained losses. HPCs' data extraction practices push the frontier of commodification in the public primary care beyond the provision of services, while their expansion strategies further financialization.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Taylor & Francis, 2025.
Keywords [en]
digital labour platform, healthcare, (dis-)embeddedness, financialization, digital data, public sector
National Category
Information Systems, Social aspects
Research subject
Human Geography
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-105889DOI: 10.1080/04353684.2025.2503841ISI: 001504852700001Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105007781039OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kau-105889DiVA, id: diva2:1977797
Available from: 2025-06-26 Created: 2025-06-26 Last updated: 2025-06-26Bibliographically approved

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van Eerbeek, Peter

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2425262728293027 of 36
CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
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  • apa.csl
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
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