Dive Brief:
- A study in BMJ Quality and Safety indicates many patients may be willing to link their social media to their medical records, potentially providing doctors with more insight and improving care.
- More than 5,000 ED patients were asked if they used Facebook and Twitter and if researchers could see their accounts. Seventy-one percent allowed doctors to access their accounts - mostly those who were younger, insured through private payers and heavy social media users. Those who didn't allow access cited privacy concerns, and some feared sharing data may affect their employment. Close to 7.5% of Facebook posts were related to health.
- Senior study author, Dr. Raina Merchant, director of the Penn Medicine Social Media and Health Innovation Lab, said social media has potential to provide information about how disease begins, how patients manage medical conditions, and what events in patients' lives might be linked to disease progression or complications.
Dive Insight:
Although ethical and logistical issues would need to be ironed out before patients granted doctors access to their social media accounts, Dr. Eliza Weitzman, a researcher at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, said in emergencies, access to this information may save lives.
"Social media data could provide descriptive information about health histories and behaviors that are helpful for building out the 'digital health phenotype' for patients," Weitzman told Reuters. "[R]eal-time mining of social media context 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."