Patients Willing To Link Facebook To Healthcare

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

Researchers may soon have another avenue to gather information as a survey of more than 5,000 patients found more than half use social media — and 71 percent of them agreed to let researchers view their accounts.

iHealth Beat reports those most likely to share their information were heavy social media users, insured through private health plans, and younger. Of those who refused to allow researchers access, many cited privacy and security issues while others were concerned that sharing such data could affect their employment.

Additionally, researchers note 7.5 percent of Facebook posts were contextually associated with health. Also, patients with common diseases and symptoms in their medical records also were more likely to include terms related to such conditions on Facebook than those without diagnoses.

“Increasingly, individuals are sharing lots of information on social media every day,” Dr. Raina Merchant, director of the Penn Medicine Social Media and Health Innovation Lab in Philadelphia told Reuters by email. “This information is in the form of posts, check-ins, photos and other data. Because much of this data is about day-to-day activities and general thoughts and feelings, it is also about health.”

“Social media data could provide descriptive information about health histories and behaviors that are helpful for building out the `digital health phenotype’ for patients,” said Dr. Elissa Weitzman, a researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. “In a perfect, creative and well worked through digitally enabled world, real-time mining of social media content could be revealing allergies, medications or health problems that are otherwise unknown which could alter treatment decisions in an emergency situation and be life-saving.”