Phenotyping as disciplinary practice: Data infrastructure and the interprofessional conflict over drug use in California

• Main Authors: Mustafa I Hussain, Geoffrey C Bowker
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publishing 2021-08-01
• Series: Big Data & Society
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211031258

The narrative of the digital phenotype as a transformative vector in healthcare is nearly identical to the concept of “data drivenness” in other fields such as law enforcement. We examine the role of a prescription drug monitoring program in California—a computerized law enforcement surveillance program enabled by a landmark Supreme Court case that upheld “broad police powers”—in the interprofessional conflict between physicians and law enforcement over the jurisdiction of drug use. We bring together interview passages, clinical artifacts, and academic and gray literature to investigate the power relations between police, physicians, and patients to show that prescribing data appear to the physician as evidence of problematic patient behavior by the patients, and to law enforcement as evidence of physician misconduct. In turn, physicians have adopted a disciplinary approach to patients, using quasi-legalistic documents to litigate patient behavior. We conclude that police powers have been used to pave data infrastructure through a contested jurisdiction, and law enforcement have used that infrastructure to enroll physicians into the work of disciplining patients.