Maria Inmaculada Grau, Hospital Clinic de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain Francisco J Grajales III*, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada Track: Research Presentation Topic: Building virtual communities and social networking applications for patients and consumers Presentation Type: Oral presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Building: Mermaid Room: Room 1 - Newgate Date: 2013-09-23 10:30 AM – 11:15 AM Last modified: 2013-09-25

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Background: Forumclinic is a free, interactive, eLearning health and wellness-promotion platform for Spanish and Catalan-speaking patients with chronic diseases. Although the platform uses a number of multimedia modalities to help patients cope with their disease, it also uses disease-specific physician-specialist moderated forums that have successfully created virtual communities for patient support.
On October 19th, 2012, Forumclinic celebrated its five year anniversary with a contest of patient stories on how the platform impacts health and wellness. The contest was open to any registered forum user and the stories were subject to a public voting process. The top ten finalists received 671 (combined) votes.
Objective: To understand the patient perspective of how our virtual support groups help them cope with illness.
Methods: Using a Critical-Interpretive Framework, we conducted a content analysis of the three winning stories. Although the entries varied significantly in style, composition, and form, the prose was subject to open, axial, and thematic coding using an inductive process. Theoretical memos, bracketing, and reflexivity were used to maintain methodological integrity.
Results: Public voting deemed two stories on Breast Cancer and one on Depression as the winners. Axial coding revealed five axes, which can be used to understand how patients coped with disease when using Forumclinic; these are Social, Emotional, Biological, Behavioral, and Other. Within these axes anxiety, community, and social support emerged as central tenets of contribution.
Conclusions: Patients deem physician-moderated virtual communities for chronic diseases as an unparalleled resource when coping with disease. Our research shows that decreasing anxiety, reducing feelings of isolation, and improving tacit knowledge about the natural course of disease were critical. Forums were also important for connecting strangers, creating a bond that transcended from a virtual space to intimate face-to-face friendships. The data also strongly support the use of physician-moderated virtual communities for chronic diseases as a modality that supplements traditional patient care and improves perceived quality of life. Further research is required to understand how the Forumclinic platform can be scaled across healthcare systems and institutions to maximize their impact.