Social Media in Health
Site: | Moodle |
Course: | Social Media in eHealth |
Book: | Social Media in Health |
Printed by: | Guest user |
Date: | Monday, 2 December 2024, 3:52 PM |
Description
Various considerations about Social Media in Health.
Each book chapter presents a specific key issue!
Table of contents
- 1. Professional Education
- 2. Professional Networking
- 3. Organizational Promotion
- 4. Patient Care
- 5. Patient-Provider Communication
- 6. Patient Education and Public Health Programs
- 7. Facilitate Health-Related Research
- 8. Infoveillance
- 9. Seek and Share Health-Related Information
- 10. Disseminate Health Information and Combat Misinformation
- 11. Offer and Exchange Social Support for Health-Related Problems
1. Professional Education
Social media can
provide healthcare professionals with tools to share health information,
promote health behaviors, or educate and interact with patients, caregivers,
students, and colleagues (Ventola, 2014).
Social media is used in health
primarily as a tool to improve upon health outcomes both on a national and
international level, to professionally network and or to increase awareness of
health issues. In addition to this, healthcare professionals use social media
as a tool to improve personal knowledge of health-related news and discoveries
and to provide health information to the community (Ventola, 2014).
2. Professional Networking
The most popular use of social media in health is for professional
networking. In this scenario, healthcare professionals participate in online
communities where they can read articles, follow and listen to experts,
research new medical developments, interact and consult colleagues
regarding patient issues.
In this community, physicians can share cases and ideas, make referrals, disseminate their research and market practices for health advocacy (Ventola, 2014).
3. Organizational Promotion
In addition to networking with other professionals, healthcare providers also use social media to promote their organization or services, access continuing education and professional development, or create interest groups. Notably, healthcare professionals can use social media for patient care (Lagu et al., 2016).
4. Patient Care
The use of social
media to directly interact with patients is increasing in popularity. Some
healthcare facilities have established platforms where patients can directly
contact their doctor to ask questions or request prescription refills.
5. Patient-Provider Communication
Social media opened the door to better communication between the patient and the provider, offering patients the chance to interact with providers to which they would normally have no access (e.g. providers from other cities or countries)(Junhan & Wang, 2021). Research in this field showed that some challenges exist regarding privacy, confidentiality and skills related to using social media. Still, overall the interactions between patients and providers on social media have benefited them all (Junhan & Wang, 2021).
6. Patient Education and Public Health Programs
Additionally, social
media platforms can provide patient education and health monitoring or
encourage behavioral changes and drug adherence. The purpose of this is to
promote better education, “increased compliance and better outcomes (Ventola,
2014, p. 495).”
Further, such platforms could be used to obtain feedback from
their patients/clients or link their patients with support groups. The patient
can also benefit from social media in health because social media can improve
patients access to health care information. Physicians can use social media to
promote patient education by making health-related posts, videos or
participating in specific forums.
Forums allow providers an opportunity to
distribute evidence-based information or to counter inaccurate material on the Internet
(Ventola, 2014). Similarly, the patient participating in these forums have the
opportunity to interact with individuals who may have similar health conditions
to them. On these platforms, individuals can exchange health information or
tips. Over the years, social media has been widely used to offer health resources
and reach and direct campaigns audiences and intervention participants,
especially populations that otherwise would have no access to health
information.
Moreover, social media is extremely useful in bridging the
communication between health professionals and institutions and the people at
large (Junhan & Wang,
2021). Social media is a valuable tool in helping people
document and share their progress of different health behaviors and engage in
competitions or other challenges related to their health with their peers (Junhan & Wang,
2021).
7. Facilitate Health-Related Research
Social media has a
dual role in facilitating health-related research.
- First, it provides
additional data about patients disease experiences by analyzing their
conversations on social media, which ultimately leads to an enhanced
understanding of patients experiences.
- Second, social media has the potential
to recruit participants for health-related research as data shows that social
media performs better than traditional methods in terms of recruitment,
especially for hard-to-reach populations (e.g. immigrants) (Junhan & Wang,
2021).
8. Infoveillance
Infoveillance can be
defined as “the application of infodemiology with the aim of surveillance”. In
other words, it refers to surveilling and analyzing the information found over
the internet in an unstructured manner to inform public health and policies (Junhan & Wang,
2021).
Social media can be used to predict future illness
onset for users by analyzing the language and keywords used on social media.
Moreover, analyzing emojis and special characters used in social media posts
can help predict certain mental health illnesses, asthma, or difficulty
breathing syndrome (Edo-Osagie et al.,
2019; Thorstad & Wolff, 2019).
Infoveillance also has the potential to
predict different infectious disease outbreaks, such as in the COVID-19 where
data shows that social media has the potential to accurately predicts the
disease outbreak case count and to use geographical data from social media to
inform medical research and practice (Junhan & Wang,
2021).
9. Seek and Share Health-Related Information
Social media is
widely used by the general population for finding and sharing health-related
information. Many studies raised concerns related to the quality of the information
mentioned above and urged not only for efforts to reduce misinformation on
social media but also for more sources of reliable health-related information
on social media (Junhan & Wang, 2021).
10. Disseminate Health Information and Combat Misinformation
Social media can help
health institutions to disseminate health information by rapidly sharing
information with the population. Information about healthy living,
immunization, disease outbreaks, prevention can be offered to populations via
social media (Junhan & Wang,
2021).
Moreover, social media can potentially combat the
spread of misinformation by refuting rumors, fact-checking algorithms, and
optimization strategies to only display evidence-based health information to
users (Junhan & Wang,
2021; Mheidly & Fares, 2020).
11. Offer and Exchange Social Support for Health-Related Problems
Social media offers
an excellent outlet for social support as people with different medical
conditions can connect and provide and receive informational support content (Junhan & Wang,
2021). Moreover, people can offer and receive emotional
support and network support to better manage and cope with their medical
condition.
Research in the field demonstrated that people with health concerns
benefit from participating in online communities by suffering from less
discrimination and stigmatization, receiving support promptly, and having a
sense of control over the help-seeking process. Overall, it was found that
online communities offered better perceived social support and predicted
increased subjective well-being of users (Junhan & Wang,
2021).