Facebook Is A Powerful Tool For The World Of Health Communication

According to Steven Waldern, director of the American Academy of Family Physicians Center for Health IT, social media has taken a toll on the healthcare industry. Patients are now interacting with patients that are going through a social media site, Patients like me. This site is used to improve the patient’s outcome, connect patients with one another, and enable research. This website has secure portals to ensure that patient information is kept personal or with only healthcare providers. (Hartford, 2012)

Communication has been permanently changed by social media. A wide conceptual definition of social media, as cited in Ressler & Glazer (2010), is “The online and mobile accessible services that enable individuals to connect, collaborate, and share with others in real time.” Social media has an obvious influence on informal communication style and represents both possibility and liability for healthcare institutions. As cited in Bernhardt, Alber, & Gold (2014), “Social media provide healthcare professionals with tools to share information, to debate health care policy and practice issues, to promote health behaviors, to engage with the public, and to educate and interact with patients, caregivers, students, and colleagues.” It also presents challenges, including risks to information accuracy, organizational reputation, and individual privacy. Social media can be a very helpful in communicating among nurses and other healthcare providers while creating professional connections, and sharing experiences, but guidelines for appropriate use by healthcare providers are essential. Whether or not certain healthcare organization decides to use social media as a communications tool - social media policy still need to be implemented. Policies help establish an organization 's rules and expectations around social media.

We Can But Dare We: A Look into the Use of Social Media in Healthcare

Social media (digital technology) platforms are defined as any form of digital communication through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos). Over the last several years, the use of social media platforms such as blogs, text messaging, games, and Twitter, have had significant growth. Social media tools have become an effective way to expand reach, foster engagement and increase access to credible, evidence-based health information.

While using social media can be valuable to doctors and nurses, inappropriate use of these tools can be devastating to a health professional career. Here are some examples

With the advancement of modern technology, social media is increasingly finding use in healthcare delivery and management. Health professionals including doctors, nurses and therapists have adopted social media to communicate with their patients and for health sensitization. Social media can benefit healthcare delivery in a variety of ways including fostering professional connections, patient and community education and promoting communication with patients and families. On the other hand, use of social media in healthcare exposes patients’ data to breaches and leakages creating confidentiality issues. Misuse of patient data results in serious career penalties for negligent medical professionals. Protocols have been established to oversee the use of social medial by health practitioners. The paper seeks to explore the recognized rules that regulate the use of social media, and its risks and benefits. Health professionals should utilize benefits of social media while adhering to confidentiality, privacy, and ethical guidelines for private or professional communications with respect to patient data.

Facebook embraces the networking capabilities of the Internet by allowing individuals to connect with others through sharing of personal or professional information and interests. Professional sites can be set up by groups, organizations, and businesses. They can be completely separate from an individual’s personal Facebook page. Instead of ‘friends,’ a professional or organizational Facebook page has ‘fans’ or users who ‘like’ the page. This is an important distinction in the use of social media by healthcare professionals concerned with privacy or boundary issues. Twitter is considered a micro-blogging platform which means entries are limited to 140 characters. Twitter is the fastest growing social media platform because of its versatility and ability to quickly hyperlink to external sources of information. Again, individuals can have both a personal and a professional or organizational Twitter account. Both Facebook and Twitter are free applications, as are most social media tools, enabling a larger sector of the general public to be able to access these

Nevertheless, the use of social networks, forums, and blogs, as platforms for USHI has continued to thrive in the healthcare sphere [18]. As a consequence, the health risks that the consumption of inaccurate health information portends, is a source of concern to stakeholders in the healthcare industry [1, 2, 19, 20]. Sometimes these inaccurate health information are ensconced in content to deliberately mislead people [1, 3], however, many a times they are not (at least not deliberately)

First and foremost, social media can be great health surveillance to the public since it often complement the information gathered by the professionals that provides a better understanding on healthcare and diseases. As what Gary W. Lawson mentions in his article, "social media plays a vital role during a health crisis because people are in search of the cure, the signs of symptoms, management, and all other information that they can learn to be better informed about a specific disease”. This set of online communication helps in not only encouraging healthy lifestyle, but it also function as a medium in providing information in the risk of a particular disease and steps of prevention. Data page from the official organization websites or news

Dr Lynette Cusack RN, from the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia, positions social media as; “Individuals and organisations are embracing user-generated content, such as social networking, personal websites, discussion forums and message boards, blogs and micro blogs.” (Cusack, 2015).

Twitter has allowed us to connect and share our thoughts through social networking across the globe, where we are restricted to a 140 word count limit; this inability provokes for

Additionally, the use of social media offers many health departments the means to connect with members of the community and address health disparities (Currie, 2012). Currie (2012) indicates that for many health departments already struggling to perform key function within the community in our current economy, the question many not be whether to adopt social media, but when and how. Furthermore, addressing the disparities among individual health department especially in rural areas. It is vital these rural area health departments strive to gain a better understanding of social media and role in the community especially in a generation so connected to the

With the use of social media there is always going to be issues with the quality of information. The main limitation of health information that is found on social media is the lack of reliability and

Social media is an ever-growing digital, content-based communications based on the interactions enabled by a plethora of web technologies which facilitates interpersonal communication and networking more effectively. It helps people to share online text, pictures, videos and links. It is significantly useful to health care professionals, patients and public to share their knowledge, skills, preferences and ideas with others (Suby, 2013). Recent evidence shows that the use of social media increased among patients and health care providers (Antheunis, Tates, & Nieboer, 2013). Neil Seeman, Health Strategy Innovation Cell, said "I think that social media is absolutely in the spirit of the excellent care for all legislation in Ontario and similar quality legislation emerging around the world. It can be very beneficial to take the pulse of what patients are saying about what they want and need at any given moment in time" (Promise, 2011. p 7). As per the meeting of health ministers of Canada, they ought to think how they can use digital tools to give patients more autonomy over their own health ("Time,"2016). Social media contributes to positive effects on the development of health care system by strengthening professional as well as the personal relationship among health care providers, by creating public awareness about health related information and by assisting the health care professionals to maintain competency in their workplace

Social Media can reduce the cost of the healthcare marketing. Facebook; YouTube; and Twitter can help the Board members of the PMH to promote the new clinic and to get new patients from the contacts obtained through the social media.