The impact of social media on medical professionalism: A systematic qualitative review of challenges and opportunities

Background: the rising impact of social media on the private and working lives of health care professionals has made researchers and health care institutions study and rethink the concept and content of medical professionalism in the digital age. in the last decade,several specific policies,original research studies,and comments have been published on the responsible use of social media by health care professionals. however,there is no systematic literature review that analyzes the full spectrum of (1) social media-related challenges imposed on medical professionalism and (2) social media-related opportunities to both undermine and improve medical professionalism. objective: the aim of this systematic qualitative review is to present this full spectrum of social media-related challenges and opportunities. methods: we performed a systematic literature search in pubmed (restricted to english and german literature published between 2002 and 2011) for papers that address social media-related challenges and opportunities for medical professionalism. to operationalize medical professionalism