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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.
Peter van Eerbeek (Mon,) studied this question.