Social Media Use for Health Purposes: Systematic Review
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Abstract
Background: Social media has been widely used for health-related purposes, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous reviews have summarized social media uses for a specific health purpose such as health interventions, health campaigns, medical education, and disease outbreak surveillance. The most recent comprehensive review of social media uses for health purposes, however, was conducted in 2013. A systematic review that covers various health purposes is needed to reveal the new usages and research gaps that emerge in recent years. Objective: This study aimed to provide a systematic review of social media uses for health purposes that have been identified in previous studies. Methods: The researchers searched for peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2006 and 2020 in 12 databases covering medicine, public health, and social science. After coding the articles in terms of publication year, journal area, country, method, social media platform, and social media use for health purposes, the researchers provided a review of social media use for health purposes identified in these articles. Results: This study summarized 10 social media uses for various health purposes by health institutions, health researchers and practitioners, and the public. Conclusions: Social media can be used for various health purposes. Several new usages have emerged since 2013 including advancing health research and practice, social mobilization, and facilitating offline health-related services and events. Research gaps exist regarding advancing strategic use of social media based on audience segmentation, evaluating the impact of social media in health interventions, understanding the impact of health identity development, and addressing privacy concerns.
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Prior literature has highlighted both benefits and risks of social media in healthcare, but there remains limited understanding of how generational perspectives shape views of professionalism in healthcare social media use.
“Prior literature has highlighted both benefits and risks of social media in healthcare,4–13 but there remains limited understanding of how generational perspectives shape views of professionalism in healthcare social media use.”
From Evaluating perceptions of social media professionalism by healthcare workers (2026) · cites this paper as [4]
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Singhal, A., Neveditsin, N., Tanveer, H., & Mago, V. (2024) · JMIR Medical Informatics · doi:10.2196/50048 · Cited by 172 · see citing works
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Generative artificial intelligence–mediated confirmation bias in health information seeking
Lopez‐Lopez, E., Abels, C. M., Holford, D., Herzog, S. M., & Lewandowsky, S. (2025) · Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1111/nyas.15413 · Cited by 38 · see citing works
Uddin, J., Feng, C., & Xu, J. (2025) · Journal of Medical Internet Research · doi:10.2196/66032 · Cited by 31 · see citing works
Sociodemographic correlates of cervix, breast and oral cancer screening among Indian women
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Doyle, T. A., Vershaw, S. L., Conboy, E., & Halverson, C. M. E. (2024) · JMIR Human Factors · doi:10.2196/57833 · Cited by 14 · see citing works
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Horvath, A., Chaffin, K., Ahmad, S., Goel, V. S., Netski, D. M., Ahad, R., Batra, K., & Lee, R. (2024) · Healthcare · doi:10.3390/healthcare12222253 · Cited by 8 · see citing works
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Evaluating perceptions of social media professionalism by healthcare workers
Dalton, C., Sarwar, Z., Garwe, T., & Hunter, C. J. (2026) · DIGITAL HEALTH · doi:10.1177/20552076251411281 · Cited by 1 · see citing works
- Authors
- Chen, J., & Wang, Y.
- Affiliations
- University of Maryland, College Park (US)
- Corresponding author
- Chen, Junhan
- Venue
- Journal of Medical Internet Research
- Publisher
- JMIR Publications Inc.
- Published
- 2021-05-12
- Volume
- 23
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- e17917
- ISSN
- 1438-8871 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC8156131
- OpenAlex
- W3155976349
- Cited by
- 1,073
- References
- 176
- Citations by year
- 2026: 274 · 2025: 296 · 2024: 228 · 2023: 196 · 2022: 69 · 2021: 8 · 2018: 1
- FWCI
- 13.57
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Journal of Medical Internet Research (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- The HKU Scholars Hub (University of Hong Kong) (acceptedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Health › Social Media in Health Education
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › General Health Professions › Health Literacy and Information Accessibility
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › General Health Professions › Mobile Health and mHealth Applications
- Keywords
- social media, health communication, health interventions, health campaigns, medical education, outbreak surveillance, social mobilization, privacy concerns, audience segmentation, COVID-19 pandemic, health research
- MeSH terms
- COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, Health Promotion, Humans, Patient Education as Topic, Public Health, Social Media
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
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