Ethical aspects of using medical social media in healthcare applications.

The advances in internet and mobile technologies and their increased use in healthcare led to the development of a new research field: health web science. Many research questions are addressed in that field, starting from analysing social-media data, to recruiting participants for clinical studies and monitoring the public health status. The information provided through this channel is unique in a sense that there is no other written source of experiences from patients and health carers. The increased usage and analysis of health web data poses questions on privacy, and ethics. Through a literature review, the current awareness on ethical issues in the context of public health monitoring and research using medical social media data is determined. Further, considerations on the topic were collected from members of the IMIA Social Media Working group.