Abstract:The evolution of Internet from static Web "publishing" to the highly participative, and data-driven, innovations of Web 2.0 has been influencing how people search for health-related information. This review included studies indexed in the PubMed electronic database that focused on social media analysis, examining relationships between participants (patients and healthcare consumers) through social media usage. The obtained results showed that previous research regarding social media's impact on patients and healthcare consumers aimed at a combination of platforms, but there is a penury of information about niche topics or its usage for retrieving medical information. Nevertheless, social media proved to be to be a promising tool in research mainly for recruitment purposes. The review has outlined that eHealth literacy is an attribute for populations that are female and relatively young and educated. Blogs share personal experiences, YouTube contains unregulated, high-and low-quality information that can mislead individuals, Facebook contains more marketing than health-related information, while Wikipedia is recommended for providing high-quality information. Despite healthcare practitioners' and healthcare public institutions' reluctance about the use of social media, this review demonstrates the usefulness of social media for patients and healthcare consumers in retrieving health-related information based on content availability and usage implications, and highlights gaps in knowledge that further research needs to fill.

Introduction Locking the humanity in their homes, COVID‐19 forced people to use the technology at hand to keep informed about the outbreak and to keep close to their loved ones. During this time, even if physical health is theoretically unaffected, keeping calm and sane can be challenging. The aim of this research was to evaluate whether exposure to COVID‐19 information available in the digital space has a different impact on the mental condition of Romanian medical staff, compared with the general population, particularly searching for depression and anxiety symptoms. Materials and methods An online survey was conducted from April 6 to 16, 2020 within the Romanian users of Social Media platforms. The questionnaire assessed depression with the WHO‐Five Well‐Being Index, anxiety with the Generalised Anxiety Disorder Scale and Social Media exposure by asking how often the respondents saw COVID‐19 related information on the most popular Social Media channels in Romania. Information about: gender, age, educational level, occupation, area of living and risk category was also collected. The risk categories were defined as no risk, medium risk and medical staff. Results Almost 90% of the 402 participants received daily through at least one Social Media channel information related to the COVID‐19 outbreak. Social Media Exposure significantly associated with the risk group only for Facebook and LinkedIn. However, exposure to information regarding COVID‐19 was neither associated with anxiety nor depression. No significant association was identified neither between age class and self‐assessed anxiety nor self‐assessed depression. The self‐assessment of depression was significantly more frequent as compared with the self‐assessment of anxiety. Conclusion The results of this research are opposite to most of the already published literature. Depression and anxiety could not be correlated with the context of lockdown and excessive COVID‐19‐related information.

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Introduction. Locking the humanity in their homes, COVID-19 forced people to use the technology at hand to keep informed about the outbreak and to keep close to their loved ones. During this time, even if physical health is theoretically unaffected, keeping calm and sane can be challenging. The aim of this research was to evaluate whether exposure to COVID-19 information available in the digital space has a different impact on the mental condition of Romanian medical staff, compared to general population, particularly searching for depression and anxiety symptoms. Materials and methods. An online survey was conducted

Background: Across the globe it has been observed a high reluctance among doctors to engage with social media. The hereby research aims to analyze how physicians circulate medical information using social media. Material and method: The targeted sample population was represented by family physicians and dentists who during 2017 had a contract with the Romanian National Health Insurance House. From the website of the Romanian National Health Insurance House were collected the available e-mail addresses (8,497) and phone numbers (5,422). The call to complete in the research contained a link to the online questionnaire. The request to partake was sent via SMS, WhatsApp and / or e-mail from 24 May to 14 July 2017. For comparison purposes the responders were split in 3 age groups. Millennials were defined as below 38 years old. Generation X represented people between 38 and 51 years old. Baby Boomers were the group aged above 51 years old. Results: The described methodology generated 120 valid questionnaires. The majority of them came from women (61%) living in urban areas (71%) working in private practices using Facebook (85%). Generation X connect more to SM from public places as compared to Baby Boomers (p=0.007). Doctors seek medical information on SM monthly (83%) but rarely give advice through SM to colleagues (28%) or contribute to patients’ medical education (32%). Most physicians interact with their patients through SM (59%), but do not discuss with them about how to search for health information. Conclusion: This research highlighted a low SM usage among Romanian physicians. As anticipated, doctor’s awareness of the SM’s versatile environment was strongly influenced by their age. While doctors acknowledged SM as a resource for medical information they did not engage in cultivating patient’s medical education through these platforms.