Is There a Role for Social Technologies in Collaborative Healthcare?

The exponential growth, variety, and sophistication of the information communication technologies (ICTs) plus their growing accessibility are transforming how clinical practitioners, patients, and their families can work together. Social technologies are the ICTs tools that augment the ability of pe...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Families systems & health 2011-03, Vol.29 (1), p.1-14
Main Author: Bacigalupe, Gonzalo
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Collaboration
Communication
Computer Communication Networks
Consumer Health Information
Health care
Health Care Services
Humans
Information and Communication Technology
Information technology
Internet
Medical personnel
Medical practice
Medicine
Practice
Social Behavior
Social Networks
Technology application
Telemedicine
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The exponential growth, variety, and sophistication of the information communication technologies (ICTs) plus their growing accessibility are transforming how clinical practitioners, patients, and their families can work together. Social technologies are the ICTs tools that augment the ability of people to communicate and collaborate despite obstacles of geography and time. There is still little empirical research on the impact of social technologies in the case of collaborative health. Defining a set of social technologies with potential for developing, sustaining, and strengthening the collaborative health agenda should prove useful for practitioners and researchers. This paper is based on an extensive review of the literature focusing on emerging technologies and the experience of the author as a consultant to health care professionals learning about social technologies. A note of caution is required: the phenomenon is complex and hard to describe in writing (a medium very different from the technologies themselves). Hardware and software are in continuous development and the iterative adaptation of the emergent social technologies for new forms of virtual communication.
ISSN:1091-7527
1939-0602
DOI:10.1037/a0022093