JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

As the world continues to advance technologically, social media (SM) is becoming an essential part of billions of people’s lives around the world and is affecting almost every industry imaginable. The more digitally oriented the world becomes, the more the health care industry visualizes SM as an important channel for health care promotion, employment, recruiting new clients/patients, marketing for health care providers (HCP), building a better brand name and much more. HCP are bound to ethical principles towards their colleagues, patients, and the public in the digital as much as in the real world.

Objective:

The aims of this review were to define SM, shed light on SM usage around the world and discuss how it has been an essential tool utilized in the health care industry, from a health care provider’s perspective.

Methods:

A literature review took place between March and April 2020 MEDLINE, PubMed, Google Scholar and Web of Science for all English medical studies that were published since 2004 that discussed social media use in any form for healthcare. Studies that were not in English, whose full text was not accessible or that investigated the patient’s perspective were excluded from this part, so were reviews pertaining to ethical and legal considerations in SM use.

Results:

The initial search yielded 67 studies, 25 reviews and 42 original studies. More studies were included from article references, and a total of 123 studies were reviewed. SM uses were best categorized as “health promotion”, “career development/practice promotion”, “recruitment”, “professional networking/destressing”, “medical education”, “telemedicine”, “scientific research”, “influencing health behavior” and “public healthcare issues”.

Conclusions:

Multidimensional health care, including the pairing of health care with SM and other forms of communication, has been shown to be very successful. Striking the right balance between digital and traditional health care is imperative.