Social Medicine: Twitter in Healthcare

Abstract

Social media enables the public sharing of information. With the recent emphasis on transparency and the open sharing of information between doctors and patients, the intersection of social media and healthcare is of particular interest. Twitter is currently the most popular form of social media used for healthcare communication; here, we examine the use of Twitter in medicine and specifically explore in what capacity using Twitter to share information on treatments and research has the potential to improve care. The sharing of information on Twitter can create a communicative and collaborative atmosphere for patients, physicians, and researchers and even improve quality of care. However, risks involved with using Twitter for healthcare discourse include high rates of misinformation, difficulties in verifying the credibility of sources, overwhelmingly high volumes of information available on Twitter, concerns about professionalism, and the opportunity cost of using physician time. Ultimately, the use of Twitter in healthcare can allow patients, healthcare professionals, and researchers to be more informed, but specific guidelines for appropriate use are necessary.

Die Rolle des Internets für Gesundheitsinformationen in der Hals-Nasen-Ohrenheilkunde

“…Due to the high speed and the possibility of distributing information via re-tweets, Twitter may be an efficient communication medium for institutions and subjects from the healthcare sector [149]. Beside the time efforts that have to be spent on another communication medium, a high percentage of wrong information as well as the typical difficulty to evaluate the trustworthiness of an online source is critically discussed [150]. Up to now, no systematic review on the use and on the benefit of Twitter is available for the discipline of otorhinolaryngology.…”

Fake News Analysis Modeling Using Quote Retweet

“…When all ST information was displayed on one page, the respective Tweet information was parsed using the tagged keywords from HTML codes of Webpage and then read into a list (lines 8-23). Respective information of list was merged into one data frame and saved in the 'ST_info' table (lines [24][25].…”

“…In general, social media outlets are used for conversation and chitchat, but sometimes are used for sharing information with the community or to report news [21]. It has been confirmed that they have great influence in politics, economy, culture, and healthcare [22][23][24][25]. Twitter is one of the social media services that are commonly used for sharing information and building rapport, and a considerable part of Twitter is also used for the delivery of newsflashes or headlines [7].…”

Marketing social, indicadores de bienestar y ODS. Análisis de la cuenta oficial del gobierno de España @desdelamoncloa

“…Diversos estudios avalan su idoneidad como herramienta de comunicación en la esfera pública y en la política como Golbeck y Hansen (2014); McGregor y Mourao (2016); Bain y Chaban (2017), entre otros. Recientemente muchas investigaciones se han dirigido a temas relacionados con la salud (Chen et al 2017;Pershad et al, 2018;Aboelmaged, 2018;Zhang & Ahmed, 2019;Colditz et al, 2019;Chua et al, 2019).…”