Health care social media: Expectations of users in a developing country

Background: affordability,acceptability,accommodation,availability,and accessibility are the five most important dimensions of access to health services. seventy two percent of indian population lives in the semi-urban and rural areas. the strong mismatch of ratio of hospitals to patients,rising costs of health care,rapidly changing demographics,increasing population,and heightened demands in pricing for technological health care usage in emerging economies necessitate a unique health delivery solution model using social media. the greater disease burden lies in the health care delivery in developing country like india. this is due to the lack of health care infrastructure in the majority of semi-urban and rural regions. new techniques need to be introduced in these regions to overcome these issues. in present scenario,people use social media right from business,automobiles,arts,book marking,cooking,entertainment,and general networking. the developed and advanced country like the united states has developed their communication system many years from now. they have already established social media in a number of domains including health care. the similar practice incidences can be used to provide a new dimension to the health care in indian semi-urban regions. objective: this paper is an extended study of a previous empirical study of the expectations the users of social media for health care. the paper aims to find what the users of social media expect from a health care social media site. methods: multiple regression analysis has been used to determine which factors affect the usage of health care social media. four factors namely,privacy,immediacy,usability,and communication have been used as the independent variables for finding the significance influence on health care social media as dependant variable. results: the response was generated form the online questionnaire tool. there were 103 respondents after many reminders over the internet. the results from the multiple regression analysis using spss 20 shows that the model is fit with p=.011 which less than .05. the results of observed f value (2.082) in anova is less than the given value in f table (2.61). hence this let us accept the proposition that the independent variables influence the dependant variables. the users of social media in india expect that they can best utilize the social media through emergency service information. besides,they want to learn quickly the operations of the social media site. they expect to know about health camps and insurance collaborations. however,people like to join friends with similar people based on their identity interests. conclusions: health care social media requires an intelligent implementation in the developing economies. it needs to cater to the expectations of the users. the people in india especially the ones in urban and semi-urban regions are very interested in accepting the system.