Toward a Typology of Health 2.0 Collaboration Platforms and Websites

During the past decade, the proliferation of social media has infiltrated various sectors of social and business communications. Of particular interest is the growth of health related websites and the healthcare sector’s adoption of social media. In this paper, we develop a typology of health 2.0 collaboration platforms and websites. According to the proposed typology, two major types of actors within health 2.0 websites are health professionals (P) and health consumers (C). Each type of user can serve as either support provider or support recipient. Thus, we define the main types of health 2.0 platforms and websites as professional-to-professional (P2P), professional-to-consumer (P2C), consumer-to-consumer (C2C), and consumer-to-professional (C2P). We describe each type and utilize the typology to investigate 16 popular health 2.0 websites and the collaboration platforms they provide. Our typology can be used as a basis for the future research on health social media.