Maria Inmaculada Grau*, Hospital Clinic de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain Francisco Grajales Iii*, eHealth Strategy Office, Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada Antoni Sisó, Transverse Group for Research in Primary Care, IDIBAPS. CAP Les Corts (CAPSE), Universitat de Barcelona., Barcelona, Spain Track: Research Presentation Topic: Building virtual communities and social networking applications for patients and consumers Presentation Type: Rapid-Fire Presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Building: Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School Room: A-Pechet Room Date: 2012-09-15 05:30 PM – 06:15 PM Last modified: 2012-09-16

If you are the presenter of this abstract (or if you cite this abstract in a talk or on a poster), please show the QR code in your slide or poster (QR code contains this URL).

Background: Forumclinic is a public health engagement program at Hospital Clinic de Barcelona, which enhances patient empowerment by providing audiovisual educational material and board-certified specialist moderated fora for peer-to-peer and health care professional-to-patient interaction. Four years after its official launch, forumclinic decided to implement a new, social media-based, platform.

Objective: This research explores whether virtual patient communities survive social media (technical) platform changes.

Methods: We conducted an evaluation of the technical platform change that took place in four virtual communities. In particular, the fora of four diseases, which account for approximately 90% of interactions at Forumclinic.org, were used: Bipolar Disorder, Breast Cancer, Depression, and Schizophrenia. Data sources included our (annonymyzed) user database, user logs, Google Analytics, and Alexa.com from three months before and after hosting change. Statistical analyses were conducted using Microsoft Excel.

Results: If we compare forumclinic’s audience during the last twelve months prior to the platform change, the new server address resulted in a significant drop in total page views. More specifically, we observed a drop from 856,496 visits during 3 months before the hosting change to 421,854 visits during 3 months after hosting change (p < 0.001). However, the number of messages posted within the fora that operate as virtual communities maintained their characteristically seasonal patterns of behaviour and some even displayed a modest increase in participation (13,491 posts before vs. 12,768 posts after the change), despite the number of complaints received due to the platform’s new user interface.

Conclusions: Virtual Communities, as an entity, extend beyond technological platforms. Although the Forumclinic communities lost ‘readers’ in during the transition to the new platform, content contributors (AKA ‘writers’) remained part of the community. Once established, a virtual community can persist independently from the technology that supports it and support itself to overcome adverse circumstances. Further research is required to understand the viability and long-term moderation dynamics, which are responsible for the success of patient virtual communities for chronic diseases.