Social Media in Healthcare

Social media in healthcare represents a growing intersection of technology and medical communication, where platforms facilitate the exchange of health information between providers and patients. This trend has proven beneficial for outreach, education, and even clinical research, allowing healthcare institutions to recruit participants more effectively for studies. With approximately 70% of Americans engaging with social media daily, healthcare consumers increasingly rely on these platforms to make informed decisions about providers and institutions. However, the rise of social media also raises concerns about privacy and the accuracy of the information shared, as there are limited regulations governing its use. While healthcare professionals utilize social media for professional engagement and information sharing, they must navigate the risks of unprofessional conduct and confidentiality breaches. Furthermore, pharmaceutical companies are harnessing social media for marketing and patient feedback, although they face challenges in ensuring patient data security. Overall, social media has the potential to enhance patient-centered care, but it necessitates a careful balance between accessibility and safeguarding sensitive information.

Published in: 2021

By: Mercadal, Trudy M., PhD

Subject Terms

Social Media in Healthcare

Abstract

The use of social media in the healthcare community to promote outreach, health, and patient education is constantly increasing. It has proven to be a powerful tool to help drive advertising for healthcare institutions and clinical research. Pharmaceutical companies are also utilizing social media to promote new drugs as well as information about research. While powerful, care must be taken to ensure that patient or consumer privacy is protected and that time spent on social media does not result in a decrease in productivity for healthcare workers.

Overview

Social media is a powerful and far-reaching tool that can help both the provider disseminate important healthcare information and the patient receive and exchange information regarding their medical situation. This is very important for those patients who are unable to access healthcare information easily. Healthcare institutions that are conducting clinical research can benefit from utilizing social media for recruiting purposes to drastically increase their enrollment numbers. Finally, great care needs to be taken when consuming and offering medical information, with emphasis on protecting patient information.

Social media has altered the way people communicate and has proven to be one of the most common forms of daily communication, often more than speaking by phone or in person. Seventy percent of people in the United States use social media for some type of communication daily. Every industry has realized the value and power of using social media for marketing and outreach, health care being a significant one. More than 40 percent of health care consumers use social media to guide them to make selection for providers, hospitals, and clinics. About 26 percent of hospitals use social media for marketing and to provide information to patients. It has been found to greatly enhance the image and visibility of these institutions. Additionally, healthcare workers use social media to engage each other in their fields. In some cases, providers can use social media to find patient health information and learn about a patient’s past medical history. In fact, some providers claim that social media is the ideal means of designing, collecting, and analyzing data for publication in academic journals.

Studies have shown that of the 74 percent of Internet users who utilize social media, 80 percent are searching for health-related information, and 90 percent of that group fell into the aged 18–24 demographic group. This was nearly twice the amount as the senior population (aged 65 and older). These users blog about their experiences (e.g., why they picked their specific provider, what it is like to live with a chronic disease) or share knowledge (e.g., dieting and exercise). The websites most often used for health-related information are WebMD, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter.

As health care is moving to a more patient-centric model of care, providers have admitted that social media is impacting the quality of care and helping to build better systems. When patients visit these websites, they encourage providers to share new information, such as concerning new drugs and their experiences with these drugs, and, when polled, 60 percent of these patients reported that they trusted what was being posted by their provider. Healthcare professionals also admit to watching what their colleagues post on social media, with regard to health-related information. One recent study showed that physicians using social media for patient-related purposes increased 49 percent between 2010 and 2011. The interest in provider participation in social media platforms has led to the development of several new online patient communities such as PatientsLikeMe, 23andMe, PatientsKnowBest, SmartPatients and Doctor online, to name a few. However, regulations for these sites are not as strict as those for governments and hospitals. It is largely up to the provider or healthcare communities to ensure that high-quality information is being shared and patient confidentiality is not being breached. Of note, only about 31 percent of healthcare institutions have a social media policy.

Providers also have to be cautious about posting unprofessional content on social media outlets, as this can be severely damaging to their professional image. Patients and colleagues judge a provider by the image that they project online, using everything from photos posted, comments liked, or shared information. It is also considered unprofessional to post derogatory remarks about others online. Moreover, prospective medical students are also judged by their conduct online and can be refused medical school admissions.

Applications

Pharmaceutical companies are also heavily leveraging social media platforms for marketing, engagement, analytics, and listening purposes. Novartis, for example, uses social media to advertise for Gilenya, a fairly new drug on the market. They are interested, in particular, in receiving adverse event reports from patients who are taking the drug, which is outside of the regulated reporting services of the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services. It is considered negative to have an excess of adverse event reports. Normally, when a patient reports an adverse event from taking a prescription medication, there are forms that must be filled out for the FDA. The FDA uses this information as a surveillance tool. When enough adverse events are reported on a specific drug, the FDA investigates further, which could lead to banning the drug, or at the least issuing a black box warning.

It is important that pharmaceutical companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, or GlaxoSmithKline, the three top social media-savvy pharmaceutical companies, take care in how they advertise for their prescription products. This requires the company to develop its own social media guidelines. It has been discovered that 23 percent of pharmaceutical organizations do not have adequate social media policies to properly address data security and patient privacy. This number is slightly higher with healthcare institutions (31%). Countries outside the United States do not find using social media to advertise for prescription products acceptable.

About 11 percent of pharmaceutical companies, healthcare institutions, and clinics use social media for patient recruitment in clinical trials. For example, Biogen Idec had been able to recruit up to six patients a week utilizing social media alone for its clinical trials. Once Biogen partnered with MyHealthTeam, that number increased to eight hundred patients in two weeks. Per-patient recruiting costs related to using social media was eighty-six cents versus thirty dollars for traditional means (e.g., flyers, word of mouth). This has important implications for studies that are slow in recruiting. Those studies that seek study subjects outside of the institution can benefit greatly from including social media for advertisement of clinical trials. Thirty-seven percent of research sites have failed to meet recruitment for their studies, with 10 percent unable to recruit even one patient for their trial.

One very pertinent pilot study conducted by the Mayo Clinic showed that social media can be used to recruit for large studies. They sampled 1,516 tweets from 15,346 using the keywords “lung cancer.” They found that approximately 18 percent of the tweets sampled discussed clinical trials. Only one of the tweets even mentioned information about the clinical trial, such as providing a link to a recruitment website. Twitter is a fertile ground for clinical trial recruitment, given it has about 320 million users on a monthly basis.

Facebook is also a burgeoning place to recruit for clinical trials. Sanofi was able to recruit 60 patients for their phase IV clinical trial VERKKO, a trial that assessed the effectiveness of a wireless blood glucose meter, completely from Facebook advertising. Of note, the average case was fifty-six years of age, up to seventy years of age. This shows that for certain platforms the age demographic for clinical use can be of use. When asked about their satisfaction regarding online process of being recruited through Facebook, subjects reported satisfaction scores of 4.52 out of 5.

Social media is also a great tool for crowdsourcing for protocols. It is used to gather information on a patient population’s experience with a drug. An example of using crowdsourcing for obtaining information on an investigational drug is with Transparency Life Sciences’s drug lisinopril, an antihypertensive drug. Transparency Life also crowdsourced for information about rising prostate-specific antigen in men using metformin after being treated for prostate cancer. This project received information from forty-three physicians and thirty-three patients, using a special platform built by Transparency Life Sciences. Future studies for Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and irritable bowel disease are being planned that will utilize crowdsourcing.

Further Insights

When sharing health-related information, it is important for healthcare institutions and providers to take extra care in safeguarding patient confidentiality. There is also a great responsibility of providers to ensure patients are receiving the best information they can provide. All Internet use, regardless of security measures, is susceptible to data breaches, which can adversely affect the patient. More and more patients are utilizing social media and online services to obtain their information. It is challenging for providers and healthcare institutions, especially in the absence of adequate monitoring and regulations, outside of those already being observed in the healthcare setting.

There are issues with data obtained through social media, since it is not regulated. For this reason, pharmaceutical companies have been slower to adapt to utilizing social media for collecting patient experiences, in addition to the issues of information accuracy. There is no way to ensure data being obtained through social media is reliable for true data analysis. The same holds true for the patient. There are no adequate means of ensuring health information being consumed via social media is correct or from a reliable source. Another danger is that patients using unverified health information (e.g., medicine, others’ health experiences) could be injured by making improper healthcare selections.

Responsible providers and healthcare institutions will make note of the regulatory issues surrounding the use of social media for dissemination of healthcare information and carefully interact with the public. To protect patients’ privacy, the U.S. Congress enacted a law, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), in 1996, which makes healthcare institutions liable for breaches in patient confidentiality. This law protects all forms of communication about a patient’s personal medical situation, in electronic, written, and spoken formats. The consequences of failing to observe these rules can result in severe penalties and loss of employment for violators. All healthcare workers have been trained to observe this rule within a healthcare institution, and the same diligence should be applied to social media. That being said, there are still a large portion of healthcare workers that are unaware of their institution’s social media policy, which places the institution at high risk for breaches of confidentiality. Making a mistake can be costly and affect the entire medical profession.

Terms & Concepts

Adverse Event: A complication or reaction to a drug, medical device, or medical intervention that is reportable to the Federal Drug Administration (FDA). Usually all medications or devices run the risk of some type of reaction. All these events are recorded during the course of a clinical trial or even in post-marketing circumstances.

Breach of Confidentiality: The act of divulging private information about another person, without that person’s consent. In medicine, breach of confidentiality is a violation of HIPAA, and is punishable by fines and/or loss of employment, depending upon the severity of breach.

Crowdsourcing: Obtaining information about a subject or completing a task through recruiting a large number of people through online sources, including social media.

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA): A 1996 act of Congress protecting patients’ confidential information. It ensures that healthcare institutions and clinics abide by the rules set in place and provides patients with rights to protect their information.

Patient-Centric Model of Care: Healthcare model that places the experience of the patient at the center of all activities, including the construction of healthcare facilities, service-line, and patient care.

Social Media: Internet-based applications that allow individuals and populations to share and collect information for purposes of communication.

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Social Media in Healthcare

On this Page

Subject Terms

Social Media in Healthcare

Abstract

Overview

Applications

Further Insights

Terms & Concepts

Bibliography

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