Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Mar 17, 2020
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 17, 2020 - May 12, 2020
Date Accepted: Oct 2, 2020
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Social Media-Promoted Educational Community Among Joint Replacement Patients: a WeChat Mobile Phone App-Based Approach
ABSTRACT
Background:
Much effort has been done to optimize the results of total hip arthroplasty (THA) and total knee arthroplasty (TKA). With the rapid growth of social media use, mobile apps such as WeChat were attempted to improve outcomes and patient satisfactions after THAs and TKAs.
Objective:
To evaluated the effectiveness of a mobile app (WeChat) based community as an intervention on patient overall satisfaction.
Methods:
The study was conducted among discharged in-hospital patients who received hip or knee procedures in the First Affiliated Hospital of USTC from April 2019 to Jan 2020. The educational online social community was constructed with the WeChat app. Participants willing to join the community were enrolled in a WeChat group and received 3 months of interventions and follow-up. Those who were not will to use the account were in a control group and given routine publicity via telephone, mail and brochures. The Danish Health and Medicine Authority patient satisfaction questionnaire was used to score perioperative patient education and overall satisfaction. The contents in the group chat were also analyzed using natural language processing tools.
Results:
A total of 3428 patients were enrolled in the study, including 2292 in the WeChat group and 1236 in the control group. Participants in the WeChat group have higher overall satisfaction (OS) scores than those in the control group (8.48±1.12 vs. 6.66±1.80, p<0.05). The difference between two groups was significant for primary surgeries based on sub-group stratification. To control the confounding factors and to explore the effects of WeChat participation as a mediating variable between peri-operative patient education and OS, a hierarchical regression was utilized. An inter-patient interaction model was found in the community group chat and contribute to the OS. Patients in the groups with more inter-patient interactions were more likely to have better OS.
Conclusions:
The social media-promoted educational community using WeChat was an effective intervention in joint replacement patients. The more peri-operative education given, the more active the patient participates in the community, and therefore the more satisfied the patient is regarding the overall joint procedure. The community group chat could facilitate the interaction between patients and contribute to the OS.
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.