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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Public Health
Sec. Digital Public Health
Volume 12 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1459536
This article is part of the Research Topic mHealth and smartphone apps in patient follow-up View all 9 articles

Social media stethoscope: Unraveling how doctors' social media behavior affects patient adherence and treatment outcome

Provisionally accepted
Qian Sun Qian Sun 1Guiyao Tang Guiyao Tang 1*Wenxiao Xu Wenxiao Xu 2*Shaoli Zhang Shaoli Zhang 1*
  • 1 Shandong University, Jinan, China
  • 2 University of Nevada, Reno, Reno, Nevada, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Objective: The exposure of the content posted by doctors on social media has the potential to influence how patients perceive and judge doctors. It is necessary to further investigate whether and how the content posted by doctors affects patients' health behaviors and outcomes, as well as to identify the factors that may influence this mechanism. Methods: Multi-respondent survey data was collected from 35 doctors and 322 patients in China, and structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the hypothesis model. Results: The findings revealed that doctors posting professional knowledge content on social media positively impacted patient adherence and treatment effectiveness. Conversely, doctors sharing personal life-related content on social media were associated with lower patient adherence and poorer treatment outcome. Moreover, doctor gender and doctor humor moderate the relationship between social media behavior of doctors and patient adherence. Conclusion: Doctors sharing professional knowledge on social media not only fosters trust in physicians but also closely correlates with patient adherence and treatment effectiveness.

    Keywords: social media behavior of doctors1, patient adherence2, treatment outcome3, Gender Bias4, doctor humor5

    Received: 04 Jul 2024; Accepted: 09 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Sun, Tang, Xu and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence:
    Guiyao Tang, Shandong University, Jinan, China
    Wenxiao Xu, University of Nevada, Reno, Reno, 89557, Nevada, United States
    Shaoli Zhang, Shandong University, Jinan, China

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