Study of social computing applications in hospital websites.

• Main Author: Foo, Faris Suan Nam.
• Other Authors: Alton Chua Yeow Kuan
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences::Mass media::Alternative media
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/42435
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Social Computing represents a social structure in which technology empowers communities, facilitates social interactions and enabling creativity, thereby empowering Internet users. The exponential growths of computing power, storage capacity, cheap computing resources and wide availability of high speed connectivity have fuelled the explosive consumer adoption of Social Computing. Unfortunately, how Social Computing applications have been employed to support hospital services remains relatively unexplored. Therefore, this paper seeks to address the following three fundamental research questions: (1) To what extent are Social Computing applications prevalent in hospitals? (2) Do the presence of Social Computing applications vary by hospital type (i.e. public and private)? (3) In what ways have Social Computing applications been used in hospitals? Divided equally between public and private, 120 Hospitals’ Websites from North America, Europe and Asia were sampled and analyzed by employing a two-stage content analysis process. The results reveal that the Social Computing applications employed in hospitals, in order of popularity, are as follows: social networking services, RSS, blogs and social tagging services. Region-wise, North American hospitals lead significantly in the adoption of all Social Computing applications, as compared to their counterparts in Europe and Asia. Also, the presence of Social Computing applications in private hospitals is higher, but the differences between private and public hospitals are not statistically significant. Moreover, large hospitals (> 500 beds) were found to far exceed smaller hospitals in the use of Social Computing applications for reaching out to their patients.