Ethical Issues of Social Media Usage in Healthcare

Abstract

Exploiting medical social-media in healthcare applications requires a careful reflection of roles and responsibilities. Availability of data and information can be useful in many settings, but the abuse of data needs to be prevented. Preserving privacy and confidentiality of online users is a main issue, as well as providing means for patients or Internet users to express concerns on data usage.

Ethics of the health-related internet of things: a narrative review

“…Informal carers and private providers of H-IoT devices and services can increasingly be involved in the delivery of care and management of health. Medical researchers also have a stake in making sense of and creating value from the data produced by H-IoT (Denecke et al 2015). Making explicit the expectations placed on each of these stakeholders in H-IoT mediated healthcare, broadly interpreted, can go some way to mitigating many of the post-deployment concerns described here.…”

“…Terms of Service and other end-user agreements governing these applications tend to permit collection, aggregation, and analysis of usage and behavioural data without clear indications of how data will be used in the future, beyond general statements about third party access. H-IoT devices can generate 'invisible data' for which the user is unaware of the scope or granularity of parameters being measured (Peppet 2014;Denecke et al 2015;Bietz et al 2016). A lack of an explicit informed consent mechanism in end-user agreements between H-IoT manufacturers and users gives cause for concern (Fairfield and Shtein 2014), even when 'participants' are 'de-identified' (Ioannidis 2013), when the data generated are intended to be re-purposed for medical research or comparable consumer analytics (Taddeo 2016).…”

“…At a minimum, responsive steps need to be taken to develop a trusting relationship between patients, medical professionals, and H-IoT manufacturers, for example by using monitoring as a way to initiate rather than replace dialogue between patient and doctor. The development of norms to govern H-IoT mediated or online medical communication may also help preserve the integrity of the doctor-patient relationship (Denecke et al 2015).…”

The Unintended Consequences of Social Media in Healthcare: New Problems and New Solutions

“…The current legislation in European and North American countries only prevents patients' healthcare information from being shared by providers and institutions. Patients themselves are free to share their personal information [41].…”

Nursing Professionalism: Impact of Social Media Use among Nursing Students

“…Providing details and examples of every potential pitfall in social media are difficult to provide within the confines of a single student policy [6]. Therefore, nursing students can remain unqualified to discern what constitutes content that may be viewed as unprofessional even after being made aware of the existing policy or recommendations.…”