Social Media for Medical and Health Information: Malaysian Medical Tourism Hospital

Given the rapid development of Internet, social media opened up new opportunity for medical and health communications. Numbers of previous research conducted showed that social media shape up new chances to ensure an effective distribution of information in healthcare. Looking from the perspective of medical tourism, this study aimed to identify the availability of social media link in the medical tourism hospitals websites from Malaysia and evaluate their performance on every social media platform namely Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. A list of 70 medical tourism hospitals gathered from the websites of Malaysian Health Travel Council (MHTC) http://www.mhtc.org.my. Each URL of the hospital identified and visited. The social media link availability on the website was observed and results showed that Facebook is the most preferable social media among the hospitals which is 51.4% followed by Instagram recorded as 14.3%. The Twitter recorded as 12.9% and YouTube only 11.4% hospitals. Most hospitals only provide one link to social media directly from their website. Astonishingly, almost half of the total medical tourism hospitals in Malaysia that is 44.2% does not have link to any social media on their websites. The top ten-hospital performance in Facebook rank gain more than 15000 "like" and "follows" at their page. Therefore, it was highly recommended for the medical tourism hospitals to actively engage with the social media and promote the link on their websites so that they can lead their current and prospective patients towards various information resources for a better distribution of medical and health information.