Towards new social media logic in healthcare and its interplay with clinical logic

Social media enable patients to communicate with a large number of their peers, share experiences, and provide each other with emotional and informational support. In this way, social media using patients develop a new logic in healthcare, which we propose as social media logic. This raises the
question what this social media logic means and how it interconnects with traditional clinical logic. To address this question, we draw on interview data with participants from two online health communities to examine how this new social media logic emerges and how it interconnects with clinical logic. We provide preliminary findings through five themes showing that that patients favour experiential knowledge, feel need to connect with others, safely share information, feel empowered and either substitute or complement offline healthcare provision. As a next step, we plan to supplement our data with interviews from doctors and platform managers. We aim to contribute to the healthcare information systems research by addressing recent calls for research on the emerging role of social media in healthcare.