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Ethical Issues of Social Media Usage in Healthcare
Open accessAbstract
Summary: Objective: Social media, web and mobile technologies are increasingly used in healthcare and directly support patient-centered care. Patients benefit from disease self-management tools, contact to others, and closer monitoring. Researchers study drug efficiency, or recruit patients for clinical studies via these technologies. However, low communication barriers in social-media, limited privacy and security issues lead to problems from an ethical perspective. This paper summarizes the ethical issues to be considered when social media is exploited in healthcare contexts. Methods: Starting from our experiences in social-media research, we collected ethical issues for selected social-media use cases in the context of patient-centered care. Results were enriched by collecting and analyzing relevant literature and were discussed and interpreted by members of the IMIA Social Media Working Group. Results: Most relevant issues in social-media applications are confidence and privacy that need to be carefully preserved. The patient-physician relationship can suffer from the new information gain on both sides since private information of both healthcare provider and consumer may be accessible through the Internet. Physicians need to ensure they keep the borders between private and professional intact. Beyond, preserving patient anonymity when citing Internet content is crucial for research studies. Conclusion: Exploiting medical social-media in healthcare applications requires a careful reflection of roles and responsibilities. Availability of data and information can be useful in many settings, but the abuse of data needs to be prevented. Preserving privacy and confidentiality of online users is a main issue, as well as providing means for patients or Internet users to express concerns on data usage.
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“Global consensus can foster responsible and ethical use worldwide.[6,56]”
From Ethical implications of AI and robotics in healthcare: A review (2023) · cites this paper as [6]
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“However, ambiguity prevails in the healthcare sector over the moral principles on social media, and modern-day healthcare professionals are finding themselves facing daily emerging ethical dilemmas [10, 11].”
From Future healthcare providers and professionalism on social media: a cross-sectional study (2022) · cites this paper as [11]
In the citing paper
“As one study has pointed out [11], the undefined borders between private life and professional life are compromising the patient-healthcare professional relationship due to private information gains on either side [14].”
From Future healthcare providers and professionalism on social media: a cross-sectional study (2022) · cites this paper as [11]
In the citing paper
“We developed the questionnaire after a thorough literature review [10–12, 21, 22, 27–31]. We then carefully reviewed the questions and decided on answers that represent more ethical consensus [11, 22, 27, 28]. Lastly, we revised and piloted the final draft of the questionnaire.”
From Future healthcare providers and professionalism on social media: a cross-sectional study (2022) · cites this paper as [11]
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“which is threatened on social media platforms [11].”
From Future healthcare providers and professionalism on social media: a cross-sectional study (2022) · cites this paper as [11]
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Metadata
- Authors
- Bamidis, P., Bond, C., Gabarron, E., Househ, M., Lau, A. Y. S., Mayer, M. A., Merolli, M., Hansen, M., & Denecke, K.
- Affiliations
- Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (GR)
- Bournemouth University (GB)
- King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences (SA)
- Macquarie University (AU)
- The University of Melbourne (AU)
- University of San Francisco (US)
- Leipzig University (DE)
- Corresponding author
- Denecke, K.
- Venue
- Yearbook of Medical Informatics
- Publisher
- Georg Thieme Verlag KG
- Published
- 2015-08
- Volume
- 24
- Issue
- 01
- Pages
- 137-147
- ISSN
- 0943-4747 (ISSN-L)
- 2364-0502
- PMC
- PMC4587037
- OpenAlex
- W1460903404
- Cited by
- 199
- References
- 56
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 11 · 2024: 14 · 2023: 26 · 2022: 24 · 2021: 26 · 2020: 24 · 2019: 22 · 2018: 20 · 2017: 16 · 2016: 13
- FWCI
- 20.28
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- public-domain
- Locations
- Yearbook of Medical Informatics (publishedVersion, public-domain)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- NORA - Norwegian Open Research Archives (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Swinburne figshare (Swinburne University of Technology) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Health › Social Media in Health Education
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › Health Information Management › Electronic Health Records Systems
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health › Ethics and bioethics in healthcare
- Keywords
- social media in healthcare, medical ethics, patient privacy, confidentiality, physician-patient relationship, professional boundaries, patient anonymity, data protection, patient-centered care, online health information, research ethics
- MeSH terms
- Delivery of Health Care, Humans, Patient-Centered Care, Ethics, Clinical, Ethics, Research, Social Media
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