Elsevier

Electronic Commerce Research and Applications

Volume 27, January–February 2018, Pages 139-151
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications

Harnessing social media for health information management

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.elerap.2017.12.003Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Propose a conceptual framework of social media based health information management.

  • Present research challenges of applying and analyzing social media for health.

  • Identify important yet under-explored research issues.

  • Discuss promising directions for future research in health information management using social media.

Abstract

The remarkable upsurge of social media has dramatic impacts on health care research and practice. Social media are reshaping health information management in a variety of ways, ranging from providing cost-effective ways to improve clinician-patient communication and exchange health-related information and experience, to enabling the discovery of new medical knowledge and information. Despite some demonstrated initial success, social media use and analytics for improving health as a research field is still at its infancy. Information systems researchers can potentially play a key role in advancing the field. This study proposes a conceptual framework for social media-based health information management by drawing on multi-disciplinary research. With the guidance of the framework, this paper presents related research challenges, identifies important yet under-explored research issues, and discusses promising directions for future research.

Introduction

The remarkable upsurge of social media and online health communities has dramatic impacts on health care research and practice. We refer to social media as Internet-based tools or platforms that allow individuals and communities to gather and communicate with others and to generate, share, and distribute information, ideas, and experiences. According to a 2013 report of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, more than 70% of Internet users seek health information online. More and more people are going to social media websites to provide or seek knowledge about health, share personal experience with diseases, medical treatments, and medications, and communicate with healthcare professionals or other patients, etc. (Chretien and Kind, 2013, DeAndrea and Vendemia, 2016, Dizon et al., 2012, Fung et al., 2015, Kass-Hout and Alhinnawi, 2013), making social media a core element of “social health” (Andreu-Perez et al., 2015). In addition, pharmacovigilance, crowdfunding of healthcare services, and specialized, self-service healthcare tools also contribute to the increasing use of social media in healthcare.

Social media have potential to empower people to develop healthy life styles, make better and more informed medical decisions, and improve personal health management. We refer to health information management as the activities that people perform in order to acquire, organize, maintain, share, retrieve, and use health information items to complete healthcare tasks and fulfill their needs. Social media provide an unprecedented opportunity to advance health science and quality care by mobilizing broad social media users and enabling them to generate a vast amount of content. The type of support that social media can provide is not limited to informational, but nurturant and instrumental (Langford et al., 1997, Reblin and Uchino, 2008, Reid et al., 1989) as well. Nurturant support includes emotional and companionship support. Setoyama et al. (2011) found that both posters and lurkers in online Japanese breast cancer communities reported that they received moral support, emotional expression, advice, and insights/universality from peers in their online communities. Employing social media for health helps improve the efficiency of patient health management, as manifested by the reduction of financial expenditure and enhancement of health care in general. A patient has potential to differentiate various health care professionals that are available based on patient ratings and online reviews. Patients can join virtual communities, participate in research, receive financial support, set exercise goals, and track personal progress using social media (Ventola, 2014).

Although social media have been leveraged in a variety of ways aiming to improve health care, current research is still in the early stage. There are many technical, behavioral, and data management issues and challenges in social media use or analytics for health care that remain unsolved or not well solved; there is still insufficient understanding of economic and societal impact of social media usage for health care, and a lack of empirical evidence to demonstrate the effectiveness of social media in improving patients’ health outcomes; and inconclusive, inconsistent, or even contradictory findings from different studies are not uncommon. As a result, it is essential and necessary to have a good understanding of the potential benefits of social media for health care and the challenges and research issues that need to be addressed in order to achieve and maximize those benefits.

The primary objective of this research is to create a structured and comprehensive view of the state-of-the-art research in this emerging field. Specifically, we propose a conceptual framework of social media-based health information management (SMHIM), and provide a road map for achieving its goals and realizing its impacts.

Section snippets

A Conceptual Framework for SMHIM

Aiming to facilitate a better understanding of SMHIM, we propose a conceptual framework, as shown in Fig. 1. The development of the framework draws upon epidemiology, sociology, economics, and public health research, and natural language processing, text mining, machine learning, social network analysis, and statistical modeling. In the framework, SMHIM is conceptualized as a set of processes in which participants who have concerns about specific health issues are engaged through social media

Challenges, open research issues, and promising directions

With guidance from the proposed 4P framework, this section discusses challenges, open research issues, and possible directions in SMHIM. Table 2 provides an overview of those research issues.

Conclusion

The role of social media in the health care sector is far reaching, and many questions in terms of data analytics, governance, ethics, professionalism, privacy, confidentiality, and information quality remain unanswered. SMHIM can be manifested in customized patient education based on skill level, cultures, and health literacy levels of individual patients; social media-based personalized health recommendation systems; social media based intervention; and managing the health of people with

Acknowledgment

This research was partially supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. SES-152768 and CNS-1704800, by the National Institutes of Health under Grant No. 2R42CA168107-02, and by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. #71772075 and #71672074. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the above funding agencies.

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