Online cancer communities as informatics intervention for social support: conceptualization, characterization, and impact.
The Internet and social media are revolutionizing how social support is exchanged and perceived, making online health communities (OHCs) one of the most exciting research areas in health informatics. This paper aims to provide a framework for organizing research of OHCs and help identify questions to explore for future informatics research. Based on the framework, we conceptualize OHCs from a social support standpoint and identify variables of interest in characterizing [...]
Author(s): Zhang, Shaodian, Bantum, Erin O'Carroll, Owen, Jason, Bakken, Suzanne, Elhadad, Noémie
DOI: 10.1093/jamia/ocw093