Clinical Questions in Online Health Communities

Abstract

Online health communities are known to provide psychosocial support. However, concerns for misinformation being shared around clinical information persist. An existing practice addressing this concern includes monitoring and, as needed, discouraging asking clinical questions in the community. In this paper, I examine such practice where moderators redirected patients to see their health care providers instead of consulting the community. I observed that, contrary to common beliefs, community members provided constructive tips and persuaded the patients to see doctors rather than attempting to make a diagnosis or give medical advice. Moderators’ posts on redirecting patients to see their providers were highly associated with no more follow up replies, potentially hindering active community dynamic. The findings showed what is previously thought of as a solution—quality control through moderation—might not be best and that the community, in coordination with moderators, can provide critical help in addressing clinical questions and building constructive information sharing community environment.

Exploring the benefits and challenges of health professionals’ participation in online health communities: Emergence of (dis)empowerment processes and outcomes

“…Health professional moderators in OHCs provide counselling, clarifications, explanations, as well as possible solutions, resources, and opinions about medical issues, remedies, and therapies for patients and other users (Huh, McDonald, Hartzler, & Pratt, 2013). As such, they can substantially reduce the potentially problematic effects of OHC for users (Huh, 2015;Huh & Pratt, 2014). For example, health professional moderators can help users to distinguish between valuable and misleading medical information, provide them with clinical expertise, facilitate group interactions, help to integrate new or less involved members, and encourage users who only read messages (i.e.…”

“…Despite the acknowledgement that health professional moderators can improve the quality of OHCs, only a limited number of studies have been concerned with their role in OHCs (e.g. Huh, 2015;Huh et al, 2013;Huh et al, 2016;Huh & Pratt, 2014;Jones & Ashurst, 2013), but none of these empirically investigated health professional moderators' actual experiences of participation in OHCs.…”

Comparing Crowdsourcing and Friendsourcing: A Social Media-Based Feasibility Study to Support Alzheimer Disease Caregivers

“…Membership in online health communities can address logistical barriers to service utilization, and caregivers often seek emotional and informational support from their peers [28]. However, cautions about the reliability of health care information being shared [29], the tendency of participants to lurk by browsing rather than contributing content [30,31], and participation inequalities [32] point to limitations that interfere with the ability of online communities to support caregivers in the process of coping.…”

VisOHC: Designing Visual Analytics for Online Health Communities

“…In an effort to facilitate this goal, Huh et al [20] attempted to directly predict whether a particular thread in OHCs needs an administrator's help by formulating it as a binary classification problem. An OHC administrator's response to a patient's posts is highly associated with subsequent peer patient interaction [18]. Even when their administrators fulfill these important roles, there is no easy solution for effectively managing OHCs.…”