Health care and social media: What patients really understand.

ABSTRACT: Background: Low health literacy is associated with decreased patient compliance and worse outcomes - with clinicians increasingly relying on printed materials to lower such risks. Yet, many of these documents exceed recommended comprehension levels. Furthermore, patients look increasingly to social media (SoMe) to answer healthcare questions. The character limits built into Twitter encourage users to publish small quantities of text, which are more accessible to patients with low health literacy. The present authors hypothesize that SoMe posts are written at lower grade levels than traditional medical sources, improving patient health literacy. Methods: The data sample consisted of the first 100 original tweets from three trending medical hashtags, leading to a total of 300 t

SUBMITTER: Hoedebecke K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5381615 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature