Farzana Shafique*, University of Dammam, Dammam, Saudi Arabia Track: Research Presentation Topic: Health information on the web: Supply and Demand Presentation Type: Poster presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Last modified: 2014-06-26

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This session will present the trends of social media usage among healthcare professionals in KSA. It is a fact that Over the past six years there has been an increasing interest in the new generation of web-based technologies, tools and services offered by social media. The concept was coined officially by Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty. Social media is a place where everyone can add or edit information. It is a web where digital tools allow users to create, change and publish dynamic content (Aharony, 2008). According to O’Reilly (2005), it can be defined as ‘‘the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; social media applications are those that make the most of the built-in advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an ‘architecture of participation,’ and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences’’.
It is observed that this social media is now becoming popular among busy healthcare professionals. They are now using this media as a channel for communicating with their patients. To see the pattern of social media usage among healthcare professionals in KSA, the researcher conducted a survey of healthcare professionals linked with her through her social media contacts. The aim of this survey was to assess that for which purpose do they use the social media.
This study is based on quantitative survey; a questionnaire was devised covering different aspects of social media and its usage for healthcare tasks. Both open and close-ended questions were included in the questionnaire. The sample of the study covered healthcare professionals living/working in Saudi Arabia and linked with the researcher through her social media accounts such as Twitter, Linked-In; Facebook etc. The collected data will be analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively to reach at conclusions (note:- the data analysis is in process and will be added in the revised structured abstract and full paper). Recommendations will also be furnished in the light of findings of the study.