Social media-enabled healthcare: A conceptual model of social media affordances, online social support, and health behaviors and outcomes

Abstract

Due to the popularity of social media, patients are increasingly using social media for the social support exchange to improve health outcomes. To understand this phenomenon of social media-enabled healthcare, we propose a conceptual framework by integrating literature from three areas—social media affordance, online social support, and health behaviors and outcomes—with the goal of developing propositions on how social media can help patients improve self-management of chronic diseases. We identified and distinguished three social media affordances: affordance for community co-creation, affordance for social learning, and affordance for social relationships. We also distinguish three kinds of social support and tailored them to the healthcare domain and the social media context: informational support, emotional support, and experiential support. We posit the following: (a) social media affordances foster social support, where co-creation facilitates informational support, user interaction facilitates emotional support, and social learning facilitates experiential support; (b) informational support and experiential support are both linked to self-care; and (c) informational support and emotional support are both linked to psychological health. Our work advances the literature in the area of social media-enabled healthcare.