Healthcare Ethics and Professionalism in Social Media

Social media has become an important tool to facilitate global communication. Platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter have fundamentally altered the landscape by which individuals and organizations interact with one another. Social media affords individuals access to online medical information, facilitates communication amongst patients and clinicians, and allows photos and videos to be shared among patients and healthcare professionals. However, ethical dilemmas, ranging from maintaining patient privacy to disclosing conflicts of interest, arise from the expanded influence afforded to providers via social media and the lack of guidelines for its use in the professional context. This chapter explores ethical uses of social media for engaging patients, educating the public, and marketing dermatology practices.