Elsevier

Seminars in Oncology

Volume 42, Issue 5, October 2015, Pages 764-771
Seminars in Oncology

Social Media and Oncology: The Past, Present, and Future of Electronic Communication Between Physician and Patient

https://doi.org/10.1053/j.seminoncol.2015.07.005Get rights and content

The relationship between patient and physician is in flux with the advent of electronic media that are advancing and enhancing communication. We perform a retrospective, current, and forward-looking examination of the technologies by which information is exchanged within the healthcare community. The evolution from e-mail and listservs to blogs and the modern social networks is described, with emphasis on the advantages and pitfalls of each medium, especially in regard to maintaining the standards of privacy and professionalism to which doctors are held accountable. We support the use of contemporary platforms like Twitter and Facebook for physicians to establish themselves as trustworthy online sources of medical knowledge, and anticipate ongoing collaboration between researchers, patients, and their advocates in trial design and accrual.

Section snippets

E-mail

E-mail is a method of patient-doctor communication that, ideally, eliminates the delays encountered with conventional mail; it has been described as an evolved hybrid between letter writing and the spoken word,2 overcoming the slow pace of the former and the impermanence of the latter. However, it is also an almost unavoidably asynchronous exchange, which, as a putative benefit, allows the healthcare provider flexibility in the time and convenience of their response, but also does not guarantee

Present

If listservs were an early method by which physicians could choose to share health information with patients who were not necessarily “theirs”, ie, not under their direct care, this broadened online exchange can now occur over a variety of contemporary platforms.

Future

The ideal intersection of interests may then be found in a considerate exchange between engaged patients and clinicians online. Sites such as PatientsLikeMe, described as “a patient-powered research network that improves lives and a real-time research platform that advances medicine”, aggregate similarly affected patients in a manner that affords them strength in numbers but whom are also ripe for study, “generat[ing] data about the real-world nature of disease that help researchers,

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to acknowledge the valuable contributions of Dr Michael Fisch and Dr Dawn Hershman to the review and revision of the manuscript.

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  • Cited by (0)

    From the Southwest Oncology Group (SWOG) and NRG Oncology.

    Conflicts of interest: none.

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