The amount of information required for medical practice is growing at an exponential rate, and it has become less practical to completely master the tremendous amount of knowledge with doctors’ individual ability [
The rapid development of the Internet and social media is profoundly changing people’s lifestyles. Nearly 90% of American adults are using the Internet [
As a social medium, WeChat carries a variety of topics and articles, of which many are concerning medical expertise [
Regarding the survey, Sojump.com (URL:
Since there is no existing questionnaire able to answer the current status of physicians to acquire medical knowledge via social media, especially WeChat, we have to develop our own questionnaire. According to the objective of this study, a multidisciplinary team was formed to review relevant literature and discuss study needs and methods to develop the questionnaire. A final questionnaire on the knowledge, attitude, and behavior regarding WeChat and health and medical problems was designed based on the experience of previous questionnaire development and a consideration of the characteristics of social media. The survey mainly included the following framework: general demographic indicators, the usage situation of WeChat, the status of obtaining medical knowledge and health education through WeChat, the desired approach for health education, and the existing problems of healthcare and medical information on WeChat. A pilot test was conducted for the initial questionnaire after being developed by a team of three doctors and two survey experts. Based on the type of related questions, the length of the questions, the answer options, and the time to complete the questionnaire in the feedback, the questionnaire was modified and improved, resulting in the final questionnaire, which was available online at the following URL: www.sojump.com/jq/5854804.aspx.
WeChat is a social tool with a powerful user group in China, and nearly half of its active users have more than 100 WeChat friends [
The collected questionnaires were analyzed, and the invalid questionnaires were excluded based on the following exclusion criteria: repeated IP address in the response; logical errors in the answers; the same answer for successive questions; completion time being too short; and completion time being too long. A total of 22 invalid questionnaires were excluded, resulting in 292 valid questionnaires. Data analysis was conducted using the built-in statistical function in the backend of Sojump.com.
A total of 292 valid questionnaires were collected from the respondents, including 134 males and 158 females, with ages ranging from 18 to 50. Of the respondents, all were clinicians with 173 who had the educational level of a master’s degree or above, accounting for 59.24% of all respondents. They covered all major clinical departments of the hospital. Their titles were evenly distributed from residents to chief physician. According to the monitoring results of the respondents’ IP addresses, the geographic distribution of the respondents covered most areas of China, with the most respondents being in Beijing. All questionnaires were submitted by mobile phone. Table
Summary of general information.
Category | Number of respondents | Percentage (%) |
---|---|---|
Gender | ||
Males | 134 | 45.89 |
Females | 158 | 54.11 |
Age | ||
Under 18 | 0 | 0 |
18–25 | 48 | 16.44 |
26–30 | 61 | 20.89 |
31–40 | 95 | 32.53 |
41–50 | 72 | 24.66 |
51–60 | 15 | 5.14 |
Above 60 | 1 | 0.34 |
Education | ||
High school/vocational school | 2 | 0.68 |
College/university | 117 | 40.07 |
Master | 119 | 40.75 |
Doctorate or above | 54 | 18.49 |
Professional level | ||
Intern | 48 | 16.44 |
Resident | 69 | 23.63 |
Attending doctor | 84 | 28.77 |
Associate Professor | 61 | 20.89 |
Professor | 30 | 10.27 |
| ||
Total | 292 |
In this study, more than half of the doctors (59.93%) regularly used the Internet to search for medical knowledge; 142 respondents (48.63%) often used it, and 33 respondents (11.30%) always used it, as shown in Figure
Frequency of Internet usage by doctors to search for medical knowledge.
The approaches by doctors to acquire medical knowledge by searching the Internet.
Satisfaction with using the Internet to search for medical knowledge.
Regarding the usage of WeChat, 285 respondents accessed WeChat every day, accounting for 97.60% of the sample. These daily users were classified by the number of times accessing WeChat, with an interval of 10. The number of respondents who accessed it 1–10 times per day was the highest, accounting for 32.28% (92/285), followed by respondents who accessed it 10–20 times, accounting for 29.47% (84/285). Notably, the number of doctors who accessed it more than 20 times per day accounted for 38.24% (45 + 27 + 37 = 109, 109/285), indicating that the frequency of WeChat usage in Chinese doctors was very high, as shown in Figure
The number of times accessing WeChat per day.
Length of time of WeChat usage with the number of users.
Nearly half (47.26%, 111 + 27 = 138, and 138/292) of the respondents agreed that they often found medical articles on WeChat, as shown in Figure
Frequency of accessing medical knowledge on WeChat.
Approaches to searching for medical knowledge on WeChat.
Quality assessment of medical knowledge on WeChat by doctors.
Study participants held high expectations for new media like WeChat. In the survey of the most desirable channel by which to acquire medical knowledge through the Internet, Baidu was still the preferred website for searching (with a selection rate of 55.82%, 163/292), and the selection rate for WeChat was 34.25% (100/292), as shown in Figure
The most desirable channels by which to acquire medical knowledge.
Mode for acquiring medical knowledge on WeChat.
Continuing medical education plays an irreplaceable role in the education of medical professionals. Well-developed continuing medical education and training for healthcare professionals after the completion of their academic education in college can allow them to continuously update their professional knowledge and improve their operational capacity throughout their career, meet the needs of the development of medical science and technology, and enhance the overall level of medical care. Due to the particularity of the contents in continuing medical education, although medical professionals are eager to learn with clear objectives, they have different knowledge backgrounds, and their disposable time is significantly random and fragmented, lacking a long fixed period of time for concentrated study. The effectiveness of the implementation of mobile continuing medical education has not been very satisfactory.
WeChat is a potential way of acquiring professional medical knowledge for busy doctors. As is known to all, many people nowadays use social media as alternative source of information. Because the Internet makes retrieval easy and there are no time and space constraints, it is recognized by the vast majority of doctors and has increasingly become the mode of acquiring medical knowledge with the highest degree of trust in the doctors in the sample. However, only 23.97% of them were satisfied with acquiring medical knowledge through the Internet. It is noteworthy that, in this study, 19.86% of the physicians selected the new interactive social media WeChat as the Internet search application for acquiring medical knowledge. Over 70% of the surveyed physicians spent more than 30 minutes per day on WeChat, occupying an important portion of the doctors’ fragmented time. It has become an important supplement for the doctors to obtain medical knowledge.
Studies have corroborated the feasibility of WeChat as a tool for medical education. The research and practice of Bai et al., who used WeChat to construct a management platform, also confirmed that the use of WeChat not only meets the daily habits of residents but also expands teaching resources to a certain extent, thereby achieving the exchange and sharing of excellent teaching resources [
WeChat and other social media education platforms have been widely recognized by the contents of medical education due to their characteristics related to flexible knowledge dissemination, freedom from the constraints of time and place, the large amount of information, rapid dissemination, the large audience size, ease of management, and strong social attributes and interaction, and they have become an important platform for medical education organizations to perform medical education. Currently, acquiring medical knowledge and the latest medical information through the Internet and new media has become a main means through which active medical staff access information [
Doctors may not be familiar with the various searching methods on WeChat. We found that the approaches of acquiring medical knowledge using WeChat by doctors focused on browsing friends’ moments, public account subscriptions, Dingxiangyuan browsing for WeChat, and group chat (with selection rates of 59.93%, 60.27%, 44.86%, and 34.93%, resp.). The selection rates for WeChat search, Sogou (a third-party search engine) search for WeChat, the mobile phone QQ browser, and WeChat hot articles were relatively low, but these methods are actually able to greatly enhance the efficiency of WeChat search. Thus, it is necessary to strengthen training on the relevant skills, thus providing greater convenience for doctors to take full advantage of WeChat in acquiring sufficient medical knowledge. Information overload and the proliferation of false information are the important issues of new media. How to obtain valuable information from redundant information and how to discern truth from falsehood through independent judgment have become the new challenge for all individuals in the era of new media. Whether the user has the abilities to select, understand, question, assess, create, produce, and speculatively respond to the targeted information, particularly the ability of independent judgment, has become a prerequisite that determines whether the user can benefit from the age of new media [
There were major concerns with the quality of medical information on WeChat, especially with regard to content. Doctors acquire medical knowledge on the premise of its quality. Only correct professional knowledge has value in learning. In the assessment of the quality of medical knowledge on WeChat by the doctor respondents, the rating on readability was the highest, whereas the evaluation ratings on professionalism and professional improvement were lower. Currently, the potential problems of medical information on WeChat of the highest concern for the doctors included the homogenization of information, unguaranteed professionalism, and too many advertisements. The issue of the least concern was readability, and 45.21% respondents considered that it had no significant impact on improving their professional skills. This result indicates that nearly half of the doctors distrusted the medical knowledge on WeChat. The overabundant flood of homogeneous information, advertisements, and unprofessional information without filtering may be the main reasons. In a study from another country, Decamp reached a similar conclusion [
First, the present study used the random snowball sampling method in the survey, and the only respondents were doctors in the private WeChat friends’ circle of the researchers. Although the doctors were distributed nationwide and the responses were random and independent, these samples are insufficient to represent all doctors in China. However, they may reflect the situation of acquiring medical knowledge and WeChat usage in the doctors of China to a certain extent. This study is the first large-scale study in China. Second, because the questionnaires were distributed online, they were convenient in many aspects including questionnaire publishing, collection, and analysis. However, the questionnaire collection period was short and had a small number of valid responses (only 292); thus, randomness may exist in the responses. These factors most likely caused the bias in the results; thus, this study is only an exploratory attempt in the field. Accurate and more convincing research requires a further expanded sample size, a strictly random method, improvement in the reliability and validity of the questionnaire, and strict control of all the details in the survey so that the results can be more objective and scientific.
This study is only a preliminary investigation from the perspective of doctors’ acquisition of medical knowledge. Our further research is being conducted as follows: first, a larger and strictly randomized investigation on the channel of continuing education in doctors and the impact of WeChat on continuing education; second, a study of other behaviors and the effects of WeChat usage by doctors, such as research on the doctor-patient interaction and doctors’ attitudes toward and approach to online medical consultation service using WeChat; and third, research on quality assessment methods for medical knowledge on WeChat and how to achieve more effective communication for high-quality articles through WeChat. In summary, social media, especially WeChat, have profoundly changed the public’s lifestyle and become part of the public’s everyday life. WeChat will certainly have an increasingly important impact on healthcare services, such as medical knowledge learning, health education, and medical services in doctors. Research and application in this area will be a very important direction.
The traditional methods of acquiring medical knowledge have been unable to meet the needs of doctors. The present study shows that WeChat has already become an important mobile means for doctors to acquire medical expertise. Naturally, doctors have not yet fully mastered the approaches to performing searches on WeChat, and the quality of medical knowledge on WeChat is worrisome. Thus, further quality assessment methods are needed to assess and improve the quality of medical knowledge on WeChat. These factors preclude doctors from taking advantage of WeChat for professional development. In conclusion, WeChat plays an increasingly important role in acquiring medical knowledge and continuing education for Chinese doctors.
In addition, this paper was selected as one of the outstanding papers and partially presented in conference CHIP in November 2017.
The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.
Jianbo Lei developed the conceptual framework and research protocol for the study. Xingting Zhang and Li Gao conducted the questionnaire creation, distribution, collection, and data analysis. Li Liu and Kunyan Wei interpreted the data and drafted the manuscript. Jianbo Lei made major revisions. All authors approve the final version of the manuscript. Li Liu and Kunyan Wei contributed equally to this work.
This study was partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (Grant nos. 81471756 and 81771937).