Opportunities and challenges of social media for health knowledge management: A narrative review

Social media is becoming a new tool for developing health knowledge management. However, despite the rapid growth of research in this area, few attempts have been made to review previous research. This study tried to summarize the opportunities and challenges of using social media to managing health knowledge.

This article used a narrative approach to collect and review studies. In this review, published documents during 2010–2019 were retrieved by search in the following three electronic scientific databases: Web of Knowledge, PubMed, and Google Scholar search engine using keywords including social media, public health, health knowledge, knowledge management, and health promotion.

Social media by overcoming geographical barriers, developing health promotion, facilitating decision‑making, and providing public health education has been able to enhancing health awareness and improving health behavior. Doctors’ unwillingness to interact with the public, lack of compliance with the principles of medical ethics, users’ privacy concerns, and difficulty of managing negative comments are the four challenges to health knowledge management in social media.

Social media can be a suitable tool for developing health knowledge management processes if medical professional ethics and users’ privacy managed properly.