16. Measuring the Impact of Social Media in Healthcare

David Wiggin

The intersection of social media and the U.S. healthcare system is rapidly expanding. The goal of this chapter is to present a snapshot of current and emerging uses of social media and take a step toward the development of an analytical model to measure the impact of social media on U.S. healthcare. This becomes most interesting if social media can play a measurable role in improving the health of the population.

Why Measure at All?

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you ...

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