Online Health Care Discussions 98% Patient Driven

 

A bold statistic reveals how little medical providers are participating in the use of Social Media regarding health issues.

Recent statistics show that close to 90% of providers are familiar with or use social media such as twitter, facebook or google in their daily activities.

Dike Drummond MD writes on “HealthWorksCollective” and reveals that providers provide less than 2% of information except in the case of lung cancer where it jumps to a “whopping 9%” in online chat.  In a number of cases the majority of the discussion is driven by the patient’s caregiver. Alzheimer’s disease tops that statistic as you might expect.

The authors of this infographic focused on disease specific discussions and found the most discussed topics to be

• Depression
• Fibromyalgia
• Breast Cancer
• ADD
• Asthma
• Cardiovascular Disease

Infographic and article source:  NMCITE

[INFOGRAPHIC] 

Despite predictions about the adoption of social media for physicians in reality social media is more often used by caregivers.

There are opportunities for education and training of care-givers in health to enhance their efforts to support either their clients or their family using social media such as facebook, twitter, and Google +

Google + further enables social media with Google Hangouts affording a direct video conferencing ability amongst ten participants.

Further information is available at Digital Health Space on Google Plus.

Physicians should lead their staff in developing this modality.

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