Wiley Matthew T, Jin Canghong, Hristidis Vagelis, Esterling Kevin M
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, Riverside, CA, USA.
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
J Biomed Inform. 2014 Jun;49:245-54. doi: 10.1016/j.jbi.2014.03.006. Epub 2014 Mar 15.
The ubiquity of Online Social Networks (OSNs) is creating new sources for healthcare information, particularly in the context of pharmaceutical drugs. We aimed to examine the impact of a given OSN's characteristics on the content of pharmaceutical drug discussions from that OSN. We compared the effect of four distinguishing characteristics from ten different OSNs on the content of their pharmaceutical drug discussions: (1) General versus Health OSN; (2) OSN moderation; (3) OSN registration requirements; and (4) OSNs with a question and answer format. The effects of these characteristics were measured both quantitatively and qualitatively. Our results show that an OSN's characteristics indeed affect the content of its discussions. Based on their information needs, healthcare providers may use our findings to pick the right OSNs or to advise patients regarding their needs. Our results may also guide the creation of new and more effective domain-specific health OSNs. Further, future researchers of online healthcare content in OSNs may find our results informative while choosing OSNs as data sources. We reported several findings about the impact of OSN characteristics on the content of pharmaceutical drug discussion, and synthesized these findings into actionable items for both healthcare providers and future researchers of healthcare discussions on OSNs. Future research on the impact of OSN characteristics could include user demographics, quality and safety of information, and efficacy of OSN usage.
在线社交网络（OSN）的普及正在为医疗保健信息创造新的来源，尤其是在药品方面。我们旨在研究特定OSN的特征对该OSN上药品讨论内容的影响。我们比较了来自十个不同OSN的四个显著特征对其药品讨论内容的影响：（1）综合型OSN与健康型OSN；（2）OSN的审核；（3）OSN的注册要求；以及（4）具有问答形式的OSN。这些特征的影响通过定量和定性两种方式进行衡量。我们的结果表明，OSN的特征确实会影响其讨论的内容。基于他们的信息需求，医疗保健提供者可以利用我们的研究结果来选择合适的OSN，或者就患者的需求提供建议。我们的结果也可能指导创建新的、更有效的特定领域健康OSN。此外，未来研究OSN上在线医疗保健内容的人员在选择OSN作为数据源时，可能会发现我们的结果很有参考价值。我们报告了关于OSN特征对药品讨论内容影响的若干研究结果，并将这些结果综合为医疗保健提供者和未来研究OSN上医疗保健讨论的人员可采取的行动项目。未来关于OSN特征影响的研究可能包括用户人口统计学、信息的质量和安全性以及OSN使用的有效性。
