Social media platforms offering Telehealth services?

New media has both positive and negative effects. More commonly, it is recognized for the multitude of negative effects that it has. In this blog post, I will be discussing some of the positive effects that new media and social media can have on society and the user.

Social media has a lot of positive effects that some people don’t realize. Social media connects people from all around the world and makes it easier to connect with your family and friends. According to Pew Research Center, social media and online messaging users are more likely to interact with people who are dissimilar to them (Silver and Huang, 2019). Online platforms provide an area for people to meet from various countries and cultures. Social media also makes it easier for people to find and develop new interests. Networking platforms are built with the user in mind and connect you with niche communities that are specific to that particular interest. 

One of the ways new media is changing the world for the better is through the adaptation of telehealth services. Now more than ever before, there is more access to primary care services along with mental health services being available at the patient’s disposal. Oftentimes, it is easier to request a visit with a telehealth medical practitioner than it is to go to your therapist's office or the nearest urgent care. A patient sends a request for a visit through the app on their cellular device from the comfort of their home or office. The benefits of using telehealth services include more accessibility to care services, convenience, and lower infection rates among the population (Villarroel, 2022). With expanded access, telehealth services can be made available to more low-income families and people who lack the resources to afford private health insurance plans.

Social media can be combined with telehealth services to be used to promote healthcare services. This can help minimize some of the adverse effects of using social media on users. For example, let’s say that there was a teen around the age of 16 who was being cyberbullied by an anonymous user online and her friends started to turn on her and believe the anon user. The teen started having dark thoughts and felt like nobody was her friend and that she couldn’t talk to her parents about what was going on. The social media platform would have been able to monitor her usage on her page and see what the anon user was sending her.

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Automatically, the algorithm codes this situation as one that could benefit from talking with a therapist. The social media app then sends a suggestion to the teen and asks if she wants to schedule a session with a telehealth therapist to talk. It would have a built-in booking service with a popular telehealth platform, such as Teladoc, and would prompt the teen to fill out her contact information to complete the booking. The teen would receive reminders of the appointment when she logs into her account and the account would be monitored for content relating to her cyberbullying incident to minimize exposure. This is just one scenario where social media can be integrated with telemedicine services to help positively contribute to society.

Imagine the times when you saw something that was very disturbing or traumatic on social media and it left you feeling traumatized or disconnected from reality. This is the reality for many people of color when they see social media videos of unarmed Black men and women being killed at the hands of police. A study conducted by Rutgers reports that “90 percent of college students who observed several acts of police violence on various social media platforms, reported finding the videos hard to watch, while others shared anger, frustration, and fear over these videos” (Alobawone, 2020). If social media was intertwined with telehealth services, it would help people who watched such videos to connect with licensed therapists to provide them with an outlet to be able to talk about how they feel and not carry those negative emotions.

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It wouldn’t take too much to get this implemented but it would require a lot of coding and development to ensure it runs smoothly on the platform. A partnership deal would probably have to be conducted between the social media platform and the telehealth company for both parties to be satisfied. I think that this is important because social media users experience a lot of different emotions and encounter different content that could impact them mentally and sometimes physically to where they would benefit from telehealth services. I think that if this was a feature on social media platforms then it would minimize a lot of mental health issues among teens and decrease the number of teen suicides.