Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Sep 29, 2020
Open Peer Review Period: Sep 25, 2020 - Nov 20, 2020
Date Accepted: Apr 3, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Apr 9, 2021
(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Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
How doctors on social media can provide valid health information on novel coronavirus
ABSTRACT
In the wake of COVID-19, the information stream has overflowed with a mixture of valid knowledge, misinformation and constantly changing guidelines. The need for help in navigating what is trustworthy health information is great and the official channels are struggling to keep up. As a consequence we created a Facebook group where volunteer doctors would answer questions from laymen about the novel coronavirus. There is not much precedence in healthcare professional driven Facebook groups and the framework was thus invented on the go. We ended up with an approach without room for debate to keep the group calm, trustworthy and safe to enter for the inquirers. Substantial moderator effort was needed to ensure high quality and consistency through collaboration between the more than hundred doctors participating. In the end we were able to provide a much needed service to more than 34.000 people in Denmark in time of crisis.
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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.