Collaborative Healthcare: Exploring its Meaning through Content Analysis in Social Media (Preprint)

Abstract

The healthcare delivery system is a multi-stakeholder and multi-player system aiming to provide services to promote, restore, and improve health indicators in communities. This highlights the importance of collaboration in the healthcare system. Collaborative healthcare is an emerging concept that has mainly been explored in terms of the practices of healthcare professionals. In an era when social media are becoming key to the evolution of meaning-making, there is a lack of knowledge on how collaborative healthcare meanings are being constructed in the social media discourse

This paper aims to explore the meanings of collaborative healthcare on social media.

We utilize a dual qualitative approach of visual and textual analysis of posts extracted from Instagram to examine the meanings of collaborative healthcare as perceived by both healthcare providers and laypeople. We use the web scraping technique to extract posts from Instagram.

wellness centers and health-related professionals were the main group of users who contributed to constructing the meaning of collaborative healthcare (38% and 36%, respectively). The study reveals that Instagram users highlight four main themes within the concept of collaborative healthcare, namely knowledge sharing, events, self-care, and advertising. Interestingly, we found that advertising has the highest frequency (262 posts); the term “collaborative” is used by wellness centers as a hallmark for advertising their services.

This study has contributed to unveiling the multiple meanings of collaborative healthcare shared by social media users and accordingly in developing some theoretical reflections and practical implications to improve public health.