Systematic review of the impact of social media in health care

Social media, a group of Internet-based applications which use accessible and scalable communication techniques. Recently, the use of social media is arising in the context of health care and to be located an important part of everyday life to itself. Nowadays a variety of technologies found a way to the field of health care. Social media is a typical example of these technologies which has a special place in the health sector and shows facilities and different challenges for Web Science in the field of medical and health care. The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of social media on health care. The study also found that the most widely used social media venues for physicians were online communities where physicians can read news articles, listen to experts, research new medical developments, network, and communicate with colleagues regarding patient issues. Patients can benefit from the use of social media through education, obtaining information, networking, performing research, receiving support, goal setting, and tracking personal progress. Future research should further examine other financial, technological, informational, ethical, legal, and privacy issues surrounding the use of social media in healthcare. This paper is a systematic review in which the collection of information by searching in PubMed, Science Direct and Google Scholar foreign bases are limited to English and took place in the period of June 2010 to August 2015. 166 articles in Persian and English retrieved which finally due to import and export criteria, 7 articles was known as related articles to the topic and these articles have been reviewed. The results of full survey from seven studies showed in the first paper use social media in health systems. Three articles work on the impact of social media on the consequences of patient's public health. Three other studies were emphasized on the combined data from social media and their use for health care. In these studies, they discussed about the main use of social media to increase engagement, facilitate and share information on health. Social media brings a new dimension of health care and provide a platform about health issues for patient's use and other health care providers. Social media is a powerful tool that involved collaboration and social interaction between users for a wide range of people. With the increasing use of social media, more opportunities have arisen in health care. Among social media after YouTube, Facebook is the most used social network in the world.

کلیدواژه ها:

Social media ، Health care ، Web 2.0 ، Public health ، Systematic review