CorpComms Magazine

The effectiveness of online health programmes may improve through the use of social media tools that reduce the rates of attrition, new research has concluded.

It found that adding an interactive online community to an Internet based walking programmes led to a significant reduction in the number of drop-outs.

Eight out of ten participants who used online forums to motivate each other stuck with the 16 week programme, against 66 per cent of those who used a version of the site without any social media components.

The report, which will be published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research this month, draws on the experience of Caroline Richardson, associate professor of family medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School.

She said: 'Brick by brick we have been building a model of how to change health behaviours using online tools. We can see that social components can help to mitigate the big downside that Internet-mediated programmes have had in the past, namely attrition.'

Richardson added that, for health programmes with a national or international scope, even small reductions in attrition could lead to positive health outcomes for large numbers of people and significant cost savings.

A web-based approach also has the potential to deliver results at a fraction of the cost of one-on-one interventions. The most successful strategies at garnering social interaction are to use a small number of conversation spaces rather than many specialised ones, employ staff to respond to user posts when other users don't and to post new topics when the conversation lulls, and to conduct contests with small prizes.

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