Social Media and Health Informatics' Impacts on Health Industry (Term Paper Sample)

Social Media and Health Informatics
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In our society today, advances in technology have changed the way we live, including how healthcare is delivered. They impact patient care and the way healthcare practitioners communicate. One of those advances whose impact has been felt in the health care industry is social media. Seven-in-ten Americans use social media platforms. This is an increase from the early days of social media. In 2005, only around 5% of American adults were on social media platforms. As of 2019, this statistic had increased to 72%. Social media platforms serve different purposes, such as social networking, professional networking, media sharing, content production, knowledge aggregation, and entertainment (Ventola, 2014). Facebook is the most widely used social media platform (Hebda, Hunter, & Ozar, 2019). Social media impacts the healthcare industry, both positively and negatively. In this paper, we are going to look at the policies that can be put in place to mitigate the negative impact of posting patients or their information on social media, the existing ethical and legal liabilities that are associated with the use of social media in the health care industry, and the impact of social media posts on aspiring healthcare professionals. We will also look at the relationship between accreditation decisions, reimbursement, quality of care and informatics.
Social Media Posting in the Healthcare industry.
It is easy for healthcare practitioners to assume that the information they post on social media platforms is private, but this is not the case. The personal privacy settings on social media platforms provide a false sense of security. However, the reality is the public can potentially view anything posted on social media platforms. In 2017, Navy corpsmen Allyson Thompson and Joanie Barrett found themselves in trouble after images of them inappropriately handling newborn babies went viral. Initially, Thompson sent the images to a friend on Snapchat, and the friend posted them on Facebook, asking for action to be taken against the two. In one of the images, one of the staffers was giving a newborn baby the middle finger and was captioned “How I currently feel about these mini satans.” While sending the images, Thompson never thought the images would be viewed by the public, and she thought that the inappropriate behaviour would go unnoticed, but it did not. Eventually, her actions, together with that of Barrett tarnished, Naval