Health professionals’ social media usage behaviour: A study of the perceived barriers (Preprint)

Abstract

: Despite the growing popularity of social media internationally, a scan of the extant literature reveals that social media usage preference among health professionals are relatively lower than health consumers. While cynicism amongst health professionals could be the major reason, it is still unknown as to whether there are other factors affecting health professionals’ reluctance to use social media for health communication.

This research investigates if health professionals perceive any possible barriers that may stand in the way of their social media usage behaviour by testing a new theoretical model drawn from the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM).

The population for this study comprises Australian health professionals using social media, and working in hospitals, clinics and other clinical facilities. Based on a random sampling technique a cross-sectional survey was administered to 824 health professionals. The database used in this research comprised 219 responses yielding a response rate of 27 percent which is deemed acceptable given the nature of the topic being investigated. Data are analysed using the structural equation model (SEM) technique.

Findings indicated that Facebook is the most popular social media platform which is used by 46.5% of health professionals. YouTube is the second most popular platform used by health professionals (44.7%), followed by 25.1% of health professionals utilising Twitter, and 21.4% of health professionals who used LinkedIn. On average, only 8.8% of health professionals regularly access physician-only networks, and only 7.7% of health professionals used online blogs. In terms of perceived social media barriers, the SEM model demonstrated very good model fit (χ2 = 602.643; df, 233, χ2/df = 2.586, IFI = .91, TLI = .89, and CFI = .91) and indicates that information quality (P = .003), perceived trust (P = .008), professional boundary (P < .001), and supporting conditions ( P = .02) are key antecedents of perceived barriers of social media usage in the healthcare sector.

The findings of this study have important implications for healthcare providers and policy-makers regarding health professionals’ perceptions of the potential challenges of using social media in healthcare. The barriers emerging from this study call for an effective social media usage policy to provide health professionals and patients with a guideline for maximising the potential benefits with more emphasis on the appropriate strategies designed to overcome the problems. Findings further suggest that healthcare professionals need to be educated, informed and engaged in facing the challenges posed by such barriers. Finally, these insights could be useful in developing social media guidelines and strategies so that the healthcare benefits for the community in general and health service clients in particular are maximised.