How Does Social Media Affect Health Communication?

摘要

In this paper, we examined the role of social media in health communication using documentary method and netnography in a descriptive-analytical evaluation. Over the past two decades, the Internet has made a paradigm shift in business activities that led to the development of numerous technologies, such as Web services and applications for companies. The majority of health institutions do not have appropriate infrastructure to take advantage of the capabilities of this new technology. The reason of which is primarily the fact that health care greatly relies on face to-face interaction between the patient and physician. Advances in the Internet technology and social media have allowed sharing information remotely in different geographical regions and facilitated health care. Different terms have been presented for doing health care practice, such as E Health, online health, cyber medicine, and consumer health informatics so that these systems have improved the patient care performance, reduced costs and improved workflow. So, social media should be a part of health system programs provided to people through needed information; also, they can be used to make social relationships between groups with common characteristics and reduce stress caused by chronic diseases and patients’ behavior change.