A new study says that health care companies have not kept up with the consumers they serve when it comes to social media.

PwC's Health Research Institute found that community sites had 24 times more social media activity related to health care compared to corporate health care sites, when subjects were surveyed for a one-week snapshot analysis.

Experts say more corporations should be taking note, since consumers are increasingly making medical decisions based on the information they find on social media sites.


"One of our overarching themes is that social media has moved from a marketing domain to more social business, it's starting to find its way into a lot of different components of the [health care] organization," said Karla Anderson, partner of pharmaceutical and life sciences at PwC.

Health care companies that have adopted social media into their business strategies see it as a way to improve crucial internal operations like data analytics and product development. While some organizations have done this or are working toward it, one half of all companies interviewed for the study say they are wary about integrating social media data into their business strategy.

The significance of engaging with health consumers via social media is likely to increase as millions of younger consumers enter the insurance market. The study found that more than 80 percent of individuals between the ages of 18 and 24 are more keen to share health information through social media and almost 90 percent said they would trust information found there. Meanwhile, only 45 percent of those surveyed between the ages of 45 and 64 said they were likely to share health-related information through social media.

According to the findings, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are the go-to sites for health consumers seeking medical information, tracking and sharing symptoms and broadcasting how they feel about doctors, drugs, treatments, medical devices and health plans.

In total, PwC surveyed 1,060 U.S. adult consumers over a six month period for the social media study.

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