Healthcare and Social Media

Most healthcare analysts and researchers, as well as major federal initiatives, emphasize the need for improving patient-centered care and collaboration through the better application of information technologies. For many other industries, this has resulted in the development of social media strategies for improving consumer engagement around products and services. In healthcare, this has not, even though an increasing number of patients would like to be able to have more flexible access to their providers through social media and related technologies.

One of my colleagues likes to cite a statistic that the healthcare industry generally lags 17 years behind other industries in the adoption of information technologies and related innovations. Certainly medical technologies continue to develop and diffuse, but in other regards, healthcare is way behind everyone else.

Healthcare is a great example of how competing concerns often create a deadlock in the innovation adoption process. Somehow, the development and use of information and communication technologies needs to transcend several tensions for social media to have an impact on healthcare. Here are a few of them:

1. Social media privileges  transparency, while healthcare privileges privacy.
2. Social media privileges flexibility, while healthcare privileges certainty.
3. Social media privileges freedom (freeness), while healthcare privileges reimbursement?

While an increasing number of patients (and even some physicians and other healthcare providers) are drawn to social media as a way to improve patient-provider collaboration, fundamental concerns about patient privacy, the ability to accurately and responsibly dispense medical advice, and the ability to be appropriately compensated for the provision of expert services, creates a set of dilemmas for participants in the process who want to leverage the  possibilities of social media.

I don’t believe their are any obvious or easy answers to these problems that addresses all of these concerns. On the surface, social media seems to represent a category of technology that appears fundamentally at odds with healthcare delivery. That may be a faulty assumption, but one worth critical examination.

Is healthcare delivery irreconcilable with social media use? If not, in what areas might social media be appropriate? And even if all of these issues are addressed adequately, is social media likely to really have much impact on patient health, relative to other information technologies (such as EMRs)?

Perhaps you can friend your physician on facebook and ask them? While you are at it, you might be able to get them to refill your prescription.

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