Social Media's Influence on Healthcare: Advantages and Disadvantages

This report delves into the significant role of social media in the healthcare sector, often referred to as eHealth. It highlights how social media platforms facilitate communication between healthcare professionals and patients, enabling the dissemination of medical information and patient empowerment. The report acknowledges the advantages, such as access to information and the formation of support networks, while also addressing potential disadvantages like privacy concerns and the spread of misinformation. It explores how social media can be used to address common health-related questions, manage crises, and monitor public health, providing a comprehensive overview of the evolving relationship between social media and the healthcare industry, including the importance of verifying information sources.

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In the modern world, Internet is something that has become a new rage as it has made life
easier. It has let to development so fast that it is now part of almost each and every field. It has
made things so easy that becoming successful in particular genre is something that can be done
easily. In context with the same, social media has played a very important part in connecting
people without actually being there physically (Neiger et al., 2012). Although, social media is
not just for some people to be or stay connected with each other, but has also proved to be useful
for the healthcare sector as well, being termed as E Health (World Health Organization, 2017).
According to this, health experts have been using social media to inform people regarding the
changes in medical field and if there are any curative measures that need to be taken by
individuals even those are published as well (Chen, Hou & Zhao, 2016).
A very large number of patients worldwide have been satisfied or benefitted through this
technology as there has been a formation of a network of health experts with the patients and
their experiences and treatments they opted and how they worked all kinds of advices can be
obtained through the same (Jiang & Yang, 2015). Though there are serveral advantages to this
kind of technology and there is another side to it as well that states the disadvantages like
jeopardizing of patient’s confidentiality or privacy and security as well. There is no doubt that
this technology helps patients get empowered as they can treat themselves with the help of this
technology, yet th ere are dangers surrounging that as well (Jiang & Yang, 2015). All the data
that researchers collect is what the patients are stating or the practices these patients have
adapted or even the circumstances or characterstics of a patient as stated by himself only (Barnet
et al., 2017). Here, there is a whole gap in between that denotes the actual picture as in the eating
habits of the patient and many other ones that affect the health of a patient (De Martino et al.,
2017). Also another issue here is the one where amongst various authorized medical

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practitioners, other health related experts or students studying medicine also start giving advices.
Though they are legally not allowed to do so, yet it keeps happening. This is the actual reason
whyit has become an urgent issue to align the realities of the patients and their routines of
communication with the basic idea of social media (Valdez & Brennan, 2015). Social media in
various ways can be utilized in order ro reach the goal of consumer centric health care industry
by ; providing answers to common questions individuals have; maintaining proper
communication during the time of crisis for instance the case of COVID -19 or commonly
known as coronavirus pandemic; shunning misinformation or rumours regarding diseases;
monitoring public health, for instance, hashtags can help locate the areas that are prone to a
certain disease; providing open support to patients, such as in the case of mental illness or
depression people often reach out on internet regarding their mental state; and recruitment based
on research.
Throughout the years, it has been discovered that there have been various threats and
disadvantages as well of the rising technology and to stay safe from it is what is important.
Researchers have found major four standards that assist with the decision making amongst the
students or even to patients in these cases (Innovatemedtec, 2020). These four include;
Authorship, or the genuineness of the person providing advice or checking if medical
practitioner is actually a legit thing and holds a proper degree; Attribution is another aspect that
explains everything as in from where the matter has been derived or obtained; even the
ownership of the website or the sponsorship of any sorts or even any kind of commercial funding
that is being provided needs to be analysed before believing in it; and last but not the least the
currency that makes sure that whenever any information is updated. Rating is another criteria

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that guides people to understand how good and genuine the whole thing is (DeMartino et al.,
2017).

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References:
Chen, J., Hou, X., & Zhao, W. (2016). Research on the Model of Consumer Health Information
Seeking Behavior via Social Media. International Journal of Communications, Network
and System Sciences, 9(08), 326.
De Martino, I., D’Apolito, R., McLawhorn, A. S., Fehring, K. A., Sculco, P. K., & Gasparini, G.
(2017). Social media for patients: benefits and drawbacks. Current reviews in
musculoskeletal medicine, 10(1), 141-145.
Jiang, L., & Yang, C. C. (2015, March). Expanding Consumer Health Vocabularies by Learning
Consumer Health Expressions from Online Health Social Media. In International
Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction (pp.
314-320). Springer International Publishing.
Neiger, B. L., Thackeray, R., Van Wagenen, S. A., Hanson, C. L., West, J. H., Barnes, M. D., &
Fagen, M. C. (2012). Use of social media in health promotion purposes, key performance
indicators, and evaluation metrics. Health promotion practice, 13(2), 159-164.
Valdez, R. S., & Brennan, P. F. (2015). Exploring patients’ health information communication
practices with social network members as a foundation for consumer health IT
design. International journal of medical informatics, 84(5), 363-374.
Innovatemedtec, 2020. Ehealth - What Is Ehealth?. Innovatemedtec.com. Available at:
<https://innovatemedtec.com/digital-health/ehealth>
World Health Organization. (2017). Global diffusion of eHealth: making universal health
coverage achievable: report of the third global survey on eHealth. World Health Organization.

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Shaw, T., McGregor, D., Brunner, M., Keep, M., Janssen, A., & Barnet, S. (2017). What is
eHealth (6)? Development of a conceptual model for eHealth: qualitative study with key
informants. Journal of medical Internet research, 19(10), 324.