Social Media in Healthcare - User Research Findings and Site Benchmarking

Still nowadays social media is widely spread, it is recognized that general purpose sites support health issues sporadically only. In this paper, we report a user experience study of a Finnish health-oriented online social network service, Hoitonetti.fi and benchmark it to some other, comparable sites to qualitatively compare service palettes and to scope future pathways. In our research we have found out that social media can indeed efficiently support accessing and sharing healthcare information. However, our results indicate that the health portals could anyhow better engage the users. Medical professionals should author blogs, participate to discussions, and provide safety support. If sites could more actively support professionals to develop their diagnosing and care taking practices their commitment and dedication to site up keeping could be improved. Also, anonymized data gathered could be available for research. Even respective statistical tools could be incorporated to the sites by using some web 2.0 technology as Ajax. Efficient linking of external health records could be supported. Patient-secure links to general health portals as Google Health or Microsoft Health Vault could be created. All this could enable new service ecosystems to be created too.