Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Aug 23, 2019
Date Accepted: Dec 19, 2019
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Successful Moderation in Online Patient Communities
ABSTRACT
Background:
Online patient communities are becoming more prevalent as a resource to help patients take control of their health. However, online patient communities experience challenges that require active moderation.
Objective:
To identify challenges to having a thriving online patient community and moderation practices to manage an online patient community successfully.
Methods:
A qualitative study of Mayo Clinic Connect that draws insights from observations in community meetings, participating in the community, and semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders.
Results:
We find five types of practices used to moderate the community successfully. These practices include instructive, connective, semantic, administrative, and policing practices. These practices lead to two sets of desired outcomes: community success and member success.
Conclusions:
Successful moderation requires multiple practices to manage challenges in online patient communities – some from within the community’s discussion threads and some from outside the community’s discussion threads, some from authority figures and some from exemplary members. Different practices can influence different outcomes. Online patient communities can use these practices to effectuate desired outcomes.
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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.