Infographic: 9 Innovative Ways Social Media Is Transforming Healthcare

With the rapid development of the internet and communication technologies, social media has quietly become integrated into daily life, influencing nearly every aspect of clothing, food, housing, and transportation, including the healthcare sector. According to a recent infographic produced by CDW Healthcare, hospitals, clinical practices, and physicians of all age groups are becoming increasingly active on social media.

As shown in the figure above, patients are leveraging social media to search for medical information, gain a deeper understanding of their own care, rate the quality of care provided by healthcare providers, and seek medical advice from peers. Physicians have recognized the value of social media and are increasingly engaging with colleagues on social networks for medical research and discussion, utilizing these platforms to access patient care information, develop career plans, and build professional networks. In fact, 60% of physicians believe that social media can enhance the quality of healthcare received by patients. Social media has become a new frontier where healthcare services urgently need to achieve breakthroughs in the new era.

Emily F. Peters, founder of Uncommon Bold, believes that “healthcare is a perfect match for the modern social media landscape.” With a background in digital health, having participated in four startup ventures and previously worked at Practice Fusion and Doximity, she recently authored an article outlining nine new ways to leverage social media in the medical field. VCBeat has compiled the following translation to help you identify new directions for the development of healthcare services in today’s era of ubiquitous social networking.

Facebook has 1.3 billion users, while Twitter boasts over 900 million; on YouTube, one hour’s worth of video is uploaded every second. Over the past decade, social networks have fundamentally transformed the way people connect, build communities, and share information.

Many aspects of healthcare seem to align perfectly with the modern human landscape of social media: heart-wrenching stories of survival against the odds, inspiring new robotic inventions, cases that tax doctors’ ingenuity, and a vast array of medical research beyond public imagination. However, the healthcare sector’s exploitation of social media is only just beginning.

“In marketing and communications, the healthcare sector has always been habitually several beats behind, as it is a heavily regulated industry. Social media is no exception,” said Amanda Changuris, Social Media Marketing Analyst at Highmark and Advisor to the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media. “The good news is that some outstanding leaders are now driving the development of social media in healthcare for the benefit of patients, physicians, and the public,” Changuris added.

What can be achieved by combining social media with medicine? From organ donation to #FOMO (fear of missing out), here are nine examples of the clever use of social networks in the healthcare sector:

1. Opening Operating Rooms to the Public
If blood and clots don’t make you nauseous or vomit, feel free to watch live-streamed hospital videos. Healthcare institutions are broadcasting surgical procedures live on social media, allowing those fascinated by medicine and human anatomy to catch a glimpse of the mysterious world inside the operating room.

Swedish Medical Center in Washington State live-streamed a cochlear implant surgery and later aired the touching moment when the patient heard music for the first time; Memorial Hermann Hospital in Texas live-streamed the Cesarean section of a six-pound baby boy on Twitter; UCLA live-streamed a video via Vine showing a Parkinson’s disease patient playing country music on the guitar during brain surgery.

In 2014, physicians participating in World Vasectomy Day took this trend a step further by live-streaming 25 vasectomies performed within a single day. More than 10,000 viewers tuned in online to watch the surgical procedures, international video interviews, and documentary shorts—all promotional efforts aimed at alleviating public fear of the procedure’s “snip.”

2. Crowdsourcing Solutions to Medical Diagnostic Challenges
Patients who register on the CrowdMed website typically have a medical history of approximately eight years and remain undiagnosed despite incurring over $55,000 in medical expenses. This crowdsourcing startup offers patients an online service called “Medical Detectives” to address their diagnostic challenges. The primary providers of the “Medical Detectives” service are healthcare professionals and medical students from 23 countries.

A patient named Juliette (a pseudonym) was deeply troubled by her swelling. For 20 years, she remained without a definitive diagnosis, confined to bed and subjected to repeated surgeries. On CrowdMed, however, she received a diagnosis and treatment within just two weeks.

“Our ‘Medical Detectives’ spend an average of 11 hours per month online addressing people’s medical issues, which is longer than the time typical users spend on any other social media platform,” said Jessica Greenwalt, co-founder of CrowdMed. “The detectives devote considerable time and effort to researching diagnoses and communicating with patients.”

3. Raise millions of dollars for clinical research
When 4-year-old Eliza O’Neill was diagnosed with Sanfilippo syndrome, a rare neurodegenerative disorder of the central nervous system in children, her parents filmed a heartfelt video and posted it on social media to seek help. Now, they have not only raised over $2 million from more than 30,000 donors for this rare pediatric disease but are also collaborating with Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Ohio to conduct clinical trials aimed at achieving therapeutic benefits as soon as possible.

The success of fundraising campaigns such as those for children with conditions like ELISA and the Ice Bucket Challenge for ALS patients—which raised $115 million in just a few months—demonstrates the powerful role of social media platforms in garnering public attention and raising funds. Currently, the social media model is being applied to a wide variety of medical charity initiatives, such as the #strongarmselfiesfor campaign against colon cancer and the Soap Bucket Challenge aimed at raising awareness about the Ebola virus.

4. Starting with #FOMO to Raise Public Health Awareness
UCLA researchers have investigated how social networks can be leveraged to enhance peer resilience and combat the spread of HIV. The study, titled “Harnessing Online Peer Education (HOPE),” found that social media conversations tripled the rate of HIV self-test requests among high-risk populations within just three weeks. Researchers are now focusing on replicating these findings to address substance abuse, depression, and bullying.

“I believe social media holds immense potential, not necessarily due to its inherent nature, but because it has become the current trend, with everyone using it,” said Sean Young, Executive Director of the Institute for Prediction Technology at the University of California and the Center for Digital Behavior at UCLA, as well as Principal Investigator of the HOPE Project. “In the internet era, people have always used the most advanced, cutting-edge technologies to seek sexual partners, drugs, and more. Therefore, to make meaningful contributions, researchers can no longer lag behind; they must stay aligned with the latest technological trends at all times.”

5. Mining Life-Saving Information from Social Data
The vast amount of real-time data embedded in public social media platforms represents a potential goldmine for medical researchers. For instance, the University of Pennsylvania recently discovered that anger-laden tweets are a strong predictor of fatal heart disease. According to this study, “mortality prediction for (heart disease) based solely on Twitter language models significantly outperforms models incorporating ten common demographic, socioeconomic, and health risk factors, such as smoking, diabetes, hypertension, and obesity.”

Researchers at Northeastern University in the United States created an international map tracking the Ebola virus using Twitter (see figure below). In Italy, scientists leveraged Twitter to improve upon Google’s “Flu Trends,” developing a more accurate “flu symptom surveillance” system. Although the potential for utilizing social media data in research is substantial, controversies have emerged regarding ethical concerns and data accuracy.

Screenshot of the Real-Time Ebola Virus Tracking Map Created by Northeastern University Researchers (Emily Peters)

6. Direct Selection of Subjects for Clinical Trials
It is estimated that 30% of the time in clinical trials is spent on recruiting participant patients, and the difficulty of patient recruitment has been listed as the primary cause of delays in clinical research. Social media is now rapidly changing this situation. Data from the patient community platform PatientsLikeMe shows that 94% of U.S. social media users are willing to share their health information to help other patients. PatientsLikeMe has even developed a tool to automatically match participants for over 45,000 clinical trials. A study published in the journal Pediatrics also found that in two recent clinical trials for rare pediatric diseases, 84% of participants were recruited through social media. Recruiting trial participants via social networks can reduce trial costs and help researchers find cures for diseases more quickly.

7. Provide a communication platform for physicians
In the early stages, stringent privacy regulations limited the application of social media in the medical professional field. However, the healthcare industry is now rapidly adapting to the new landscape.

Professional platforms such as Sermo and Doximity are providing dedicated social collaboration spaces for physicians. As a pioneer in medical community intelligence gathering, Doximity offers its physician members access to relevant medical training resources and data on physician compensation across different regions (see figure below). The Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media is also a leader in this field, consistently working to help physicians and healthcare institutions engage with social media.

Heatmap of General Surgeons' Income by Region (Doximity)

8. Make Organ Donation a New Trend
When Facebook added a question about organ donation to its timeline, more than 57,000 people declared their intention to become donors, and 13,000 officially joined the donor registry within a single day. According to data provided by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, this figure represents 21 times the usual organ donation registration rate. While the long-term impact of Facebook’s organ donation campaign remains to be determined, it has brought new hope to the more than 100,000 patients in the United States who are eagerly awaiting organs on the transplant waiting list.

9. Raise individual awareness of rare diseases
Finally, social media campaigns cleverly leveraged Facebook’s unique features to raise public awareness of specific diseases. In the Netherlands, health advocates used Photoshop to create images of events that people had never attended, then tagged and posted these photos on Facebook. They included the caption, “Confused, aren’t you? This is what it feels like to live with Alzheimer’s disease.”

All of the above examples have occurred in recent years, indicating that the integration of social media and the healthcare industry is still in its early stages. Despite concerns about consumer privacy and the relative silence of healthcare leaders, researchers, physicians, and patients have already found innovative ways to maximize the potential of this social network that keeps people closely connected.