Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: May 27, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: May 29, 2018 - Jul 19, 2018
Date Accepted: Aug 25, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Social Networking App Use Among Primary Health Care Professionals: Web-Based Cross-Sectional Survey
Background:
Several studies have been conducted to analyze the role social networks play in communication between patients and health professionals. However, there is a shortage of studies in relation to communication among primary health professionals, in a professional context, using the various mobile phone apps available.
Objective:
The objective of our study was to explore mobile phone social networking app use among primary health care professionals for work-related purposes, by comparing the most widely used apps in the market.
Methods:
We undertook a cross-sectional study using an anonymous Web survey among a convenience sample of 1635 primary health care professionals during August and September 2017.
Results:
Of 483 participants in the survey, 474 (98.1%, 95% CI 97.1%-99.4%) were health professionals who commonly accessed social networking sites and 362 (74.9%, 95% CI 71.1%-78.8%) accessed the sites in a work-related context. Of those 362 respondents, 219 (96.7%, 95% CI 94.8%-98.5%) preferred WhatsApp for both personal and professional uses. Of the 362 respondents who used social networking sites in a work-related context, 276 (76.2%, 95% CI 71.9%-80.6%) rated social networking sites as useful or very useful to solve clinical problems, 261 (72.1%, 95% CI 67.5%-76.7%) to improve their professional knowledge, and 254 (70.2%, 95% CI 65.5%-74.9%) to speed up the transmission of clinical information. Most of them (338/362, 94.8%, 95% CI 92.5%-97.0%) used social networking sites for interprofessional communications, and 204 of 362 (56.4%, 95% CI 51.2%-61.5%) used them for pharmacological-related consultations.
Conclusions:
Health professionals frequently accessed social networking sites using their mobile phones and often for work-related issues. This trend suggests that social networking sites may be useful tools in primary care settings, but we need to ensure the security of the data transfer process to make sure that social networking sites are used appropriately. Health institutions need to increase information and training activities to ensure the correct use of these tools.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.