We shape our social media—and our social media shapes us
I don’t recall the first time I saw a peer-reviewed study analyzing the use of online social media in medicine, but I certainly remember my initial impression. These so-called “researchers,” I thought, must have needed some busy work.
I don’t think that any more when I read such studies. At all.
Twitter has long since become indispensable for anyone trying to keep up with any aspect of healthcare, whether as a consumer or a stakeholder or both.
Provider organizations that lack a Facebook presence may as well announce their intention to hide their heads in the sand and hope for the best.
YouTube and LinkedIn are still arguably optional, while Instagram and Snapchat and the rest remain largely untested for much more than fun, but the point stands:
Circa 2017, social media is to healthcare as smartphones are to daily living. We didn’t know how mightily we’d come to rely on these things until we wondered how we ever got along without them.
Given that, why wouldn’t medical researchers empirically investigate social media’s uses, effects and potential to improve population health, optimize the patient experience and reduce the per capita cost of healthcare?
From the radiological precincts of social media research, we’ve seen some edifying findings just over the past few months.
We learned from the Journal of Digital Imaging that tweets about lung cancer screening skyrocketed after the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force released its guidelines on screening with low-dose chest CT.
We learned from the Journal of the American College of Radiology that, since making a radiologist the primary manager of their Facebook page, a North Carolina practice has grown its Friend count by more than 100 percent and reaches, on average, 12,400 users in a single post.
We learned from MIS Quarterly that online communities of patients with similar diagnoses can help bridge the rural-urban healthcare divide.
And at the last RSNA, we learned why physicians can’t afford to ignore social media and why social media and radiology are a perfect match.
Way back in the early 1960s, the public intellectual Marshall (“The medium is the message”) McLuhan noticed that, when it comes to consuming media of any kind, we become what we behold.
“We shape our tools,” he added, “and then our tools shape us.”
How prophetic was that? Sit tight and let the researchers find out.
Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.