The usage of social media encouraged patients' active participation in medical decision-making: cross-sectional survey (Preprint)

Abstract

The rapid advance of information technology since the end of twentieth century has deeply influenced the ways people gather health information to use as references for medical decision-making. Studies have overwhelmingly been focused on the association between health information in the media and the usage of medical care, nevertheless, none of them have examined the association between the usage of social media for gathering health information and patients’ active participation in medical decision-making.

The objective of this study was to examine the influence of the health information obtained from social media has on patients’ preference to actively participate in medical decision-making.

The participants in this study were openly recruited from the patients who were admitted to the cardiology inpatient unit in the Department of Internal Medicine with an admission diagnosis of coronary artery disease. We used Control Preference Scale to estimate each patient’s preference to play an active role, a collaborative role, or a passive role in medical decision-making. We conducted multivariate logistic regression for examining the association between “gathering health information from social media” and “playing an active role in medical decision-making”, by including the confounding variables which have an association with the outcome variable with a p value of less than .30.

A total of 156 patients participated in this study. After adjusting for the confounding variables, patients who gathered health information related to coronary artery disease from social media were more likely to play an active role in medical decision-making (odds ratio = 2.85, p = 0.04). Furthermore, the odds of patients with one-year increment of their age for playing an active role in medical decision-making was decreased approximately by 6.20% (odds ratio = 0.94, p = 0.01), and patients cared for by Physician C preferred to play an active role as compared to other physicians (odds ratio = 5.37, p = 0.04).

Although health information gathered from social media may have been discussed and validated by one’s companions on social media, there is no guarantee that the health information is correct. If the health information gathered from social media is correct, patients’ active participation in medical decision-making is helpful in facilitating physician-patient communication towards that aim. Future studies may be focused on how information seekers use modern information technology to gather correct health information.

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