Abstract:

The rise of smartphones, tablets and mobile apps is an important development in health and healthcare, social apps that provide learning and collaboration opportunities to busy health professionals and health education for the general public. Effective use of smartphones is part of how doctors and patients communicate in the 21st century. This paper focuses on one social media and networking service that was launched in 2010 and active user base is reached 600 million by the end of 2017, namely Instagram. In medicine, Instagram is finding a niche among health professionals who use hospital-specific and dedicated accounts and groups on these platforms to communicate and encourage social and mobile forms of learning. Instagram is free and easy-to-use apps that facilitate all kinds of clinical and non-clinical exchanges, and can also support mobile learning. This paper focuses on the content of images of three Turkish hospitals' Instagram accounts on January-September 2018 which provide health-related information in the today's digital era.

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