Health 2.0 Enabled Collaborative Healthcare Maintenance

With the popularity of Health 2.0, healthcare social networks have become powerful tools of bringing people with shared health interests together. New web technologies have enabled individuals to get together and collectively conduct healthcare behaviors in virtual environments. Participation in online healthcare networks could potentially help patients to internalize healthy behaviors. In this research we study the influence of online healthcare networks (i.e. social support and network characteristics) on achieving self-regulatory healthcare targets of patients. We obtained and analyzed data based on patient-generated content and user profiles of a popular online healthcare community. This research follows a mixed method approach to analyze the data and our preliminary analysis showed promising results. This study provides several theoretical and practical implications, in the areas of self-regulatory goal setting, healthcare promotion through online communities and social support.