Social media and healthcare quality improvement: a nascent field (Quality & Safety in Health Care)

Two articles1 2 describe the use of social media to describe or potentiate healthcare quality improvement. Taken together, these articles point to an exciting—but still nascent—trend. We hope that these two pilot studies will be taken as a call to future research rather than as definitive reports. The first article1 describes the proportion of emergency department (ED) patients who consent for researchers to download their Facebook and Twitter data. The novelty of this study lies in its underlying premise: accessing patients’ social media data could, in theory, permit better awareness of patients’ health status and risks, and thereby permit real-time interventions and improved patient engagement. To our knowledge, this study is the first to show the acceptability, feasibility and limitations of accessing patients’ social media data. It thereby gives hope that incorporating social feeds into healthcare may be possible. This study had three...