Managing Diabetes with Facebook
Social media provides unprecedented opportunity for patients to help other patients in the management of chronic diseases. From a cognitive design perspective we need to understand what type of information sharing has the biggest impact on improved health behaviors as well as improved compliance with medication schedules and treatment plans.
Found an interesting recent study (sponsored by CVS Caremark and conducted by Harvard) of the 15 largest communities on Facebook that focus on diabetes. It provides some insights for cognitive designers. The total membership in all 15 communities was just over 9,000 and the researchers looked at 690 posting from 480 members and found:
- 66% of the posts described personal experiences with diabetes
- 29% included one patient providing emotional support to another
- 27% of the posts were product promotions or requests to complete surveys or participate in trials
- 24 % covered experiences that would likely not be shared with a healthcare professional
- 13% of the posts were responses to specific requests for information.
Sharing personal experiences and providing emotional support is what we expect social media to do. Meaning and emotion can help immensely when it comes to self control and the regulation of behavior. The fact that some of the content would not normally be revealed to a health care professional (e.g. comments about alcohol consumption) is interesting.
It is not clear how this type of information sharing impacts outcomes but:
“To the best of our knowledge this is the first study to analyze in detail the quality of the information that people with diabetes are sharing with each other through Facebook,” said William H. Shrank, MD, MSHS, senior author of the study. “There are certainly public health benefits that can be garnered from these sites – but patients and doctors need to know it is really the Wild West out there.”
You can access the full article, Online Social Networking by Patients with Diabetes for free. There is definitely a need for more research. One surprise to me was that there is so few people on Facebook that are part of communities focused on diabetes.
