All Businesses are Media Business: The Impact of Social Media on the Healthcare Market

A healthcare market related article in a book of social media in media markets may not fit into context at first hand. Contrariwise especially in the healthcare market one can observe the changing and partly disrupting impact of social media quite exemplary. We can see that for the information monopoly feature of the physician as the partriarchal controller of medical knowledge in opposite to the passive therapy receiving patient is slowly breaking open through online connected patients and their free access to health information using the internet to manage their medical conditions.

With roughly 80 % of the online population in each industrially developed and emerging region of the world using the internet to search, share, evaluate and cocreate health related topics, the impact on the mostly regulated and traditional stakeholder controlled healthcare systems in place is still to come, partly assumably disruptive. Furthermore new so called health 2.0 startups emerge, offering “e-patient”-centric tools and service helping chronic patients to manage their medical condition and collaborate on new medical insights. Those internet- or mobile-based medicare tools are usually yet not connected to the brick-and-mortar infrastructure of the traditional medicare providers. The convergence of both will be critical, partly disruptive and to be observerd carefully in the near future.