title: Health care social media: engagement and health care in the digital era.
abstract: Health care as an industry continues in reluctant participation with consumers through social networks. Factors behind health care's laggard position range from providers' concerns about patient privacy and lack of personal psychic bandwidth to organizational anxiety about employee time management and liability for online behavior. Despite these concerns, our patients are spending increasing amounts of their time online, often looking for information regarding their diagnosis, treatment, care providers, and hospitals, with much of that time spent in social networks. Our real opportunity for meaningful engagement in the future may depend on our capacity to meet our patients where they are, online, utilizing the tools that they use, that is, social media.
authors.affiliation: Mayo Medical School, Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, Division of Cardiovascular Diseases and Internal Medicine, Mayo Clinic, SW, Rochester, Minnesota, USA.
authors.forename: Lee
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Aase
authors.forename: Farris K
authors.initials: FK
authors.lastname: Timimi
mesh_terms: D019981:Health Care Sector; D006282:Health Personnel; D006801:Humans; D061108:Social Media; D060756:Social Networking