How can social media improve oncology care

Abstract

Social media is a broad term that can include many types of “media.” Broadly speaking, media may be defined as “tools used to store and deliver information or data,” and social media is “media disseminated through social interaction.” So social media is more than just Twitter or Facebook posts, it includes all sorts of socially interactive information exchange. Kaplan and Haenlein described 6 types of social media (see Table 1). A similar social media organizational structure is used on the HowTo.gov site (http:// www.howto.gov/social-media), a US government Web site best described as a resource to help government workers deliver a better customer experience to citizens (see Table 2 for a glossary of social media terms). Many physicians have been hesitant to join social media for real and imagined concerns. However, despite such concerns, the Mayo Clinic has embraced social media because “our patients are doing it, so this is where we need to be.” Similarly, Ed Bennett, director of Web Strategy for the University of Maryland Medical Center, supports the use of social media because “that’s where people are. That’s the bottom line.” Social media is a tool for interacting with a changing community – of colleagues, the public, and patients – in a changing world. In addition, Timimi (@FarrisTimimi, medical director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, #MCCSM) writes in the preface to Bringing the Social Media Revolution to Health Care that “we must crowdsource the change we want to see in the world. Social media allows that to happen . . .” A study by McGowan and colleagues analyzed oncologist and primary care physician use of social media. Data from that 2012 study were collected in March 2011 and showed that about a quarter of physicians used social media at least daily to obtain medical information (passive/reading). Fewer of the study participants (14%) contributed information to social media daily (active/contributor). Users at least weekly were: passive (61%) and active (46%). Another study linked physician social media properties to the national provider identifier (NPI) database, and the findings showed that physician Twitter account creation peaked in 2009, that most physicians present themselves as health professionals, that most physicians follow fewer than 1,000 people, and that the ratio of following to followers is 1:1. This information was further analyzed by Vartabedian (@Doctor_V) in his blog 33 Charts. Twitter account creation may have peaked, but I still see new oncologists joining Twitter and an increasing use of social media by them. This is encouraging as I believe that social media can improve oncology care by helping to improve practitioners’ knowledge of their highly specialized, rapidly changing field; networking among peers within the oncology community; and education of patients, the public, and colleagues.