Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Informatics
Date Submitted: Mar 11, 2020
Date Accepted: Oct 25, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Use of Social Media by Hospitals and Clinics in Japan: A Descriptive Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
The use of social media by hospitals has become widespread in the United States and Western European countries. However, it is unknown whether hospitals and clinics in Japan use social media.
Objective:
The purpose of this study was to investigate the adoption of social media by hospitals and clinics in Japan.
Methods:
We randomly sampled 300 hospitals and 300 clinics from a list of medical institutions that was compiled by the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare (MHLW). We performed web and social media (Facebook and Twitter) searches using the hospital and clinic names to determine if they had social media accounts. We collected Facebook posts and Twitter tweets, and categorized them based on their content (eg, Health promotion, Participation in academic meetings, publications, Public relations or news announcements, and Recruitment). We compared the collected content with medical advertising guidelines.
Results:
We found that 26.0% (78/300) of the hospitals and 7.7% (23/300) of the clinics used Facebook and/or Twitter. Public relations or news announcements accounted for 54.0% of the Facebook posts by hospitals and 58.4% of the Facebook posts by clinics.
Conclusions:
Fewer hospitals and clinics in Japan use social media as compared to other countries. Social media were mainly used for public relations. Some content disseminated by medical institutions could be in conflict with medical advertising guidelines. This study may serve as a reference for medical institutions to guide social media usage and may help improve medical website advertising in Japan.
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