The health suite concept: A social media platform for public health applications

Social media interventions addressing public health issues have proliferated at an unprecedented rate in the past decade. However, despite its nimble and flexible nature, social media has been applied to health issues in silos. By this, we mean that social media affordances have either been applied to addressing specific aspects of a health issue, or have focused on addressing one issue at a time, such as infectious diseases. Given the apparent commonalities in the technological characteristics of social media for health interventions, applying the same features to a distinct set of health issues leads to reinventing the wheel and, more important, redundancy in technological deliverables. This paper addresses this issue by proposing the general architecture of Health Suite, an integrative common platform built on a plug-and-play model for health-related social media solutions. We present summary findings from formative research studies that informed our idea, offer a detailed description of Health Suite and its various modules, and demonstrate how Health Suite's modules have been adapted for designing a social media-based dengue prevention intervention in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The paper culminates with a brief discussion of challenges and future directions for this e-health architecture.