Most of the health care professionals use social networks to stay in touch with colleagues, friends and family while it has been seen that most of them join specific healthcare social networks to collaborate and stay in touch. The best aspect of exclusive social networks is that the providers find accurate advice on medical issues, know and share job openings and discuss research with peers. While the social networks focused on patients, there are numerous social media channels built around a specific disease. It gives patients assistance to deal with the symptoms, know treatments and provides a support community for insights, leads on managing the disease.

While CureDiva, a social network for breast cancer survivors and patients has high traffic as per Ester Gofer, co-founder. She says that the users can choose the level of privacy they need for sharing content. Doximity CEO Jeff Tangney, as quoted in InformationWeek had expressed his opinion that having a doctors’ only social network was important as the fine line demarcating patients was needed to maintain professionalism and sanity. As even friendly terms with patients on social networks is viewed as privacy violations.

Additionally, the security problems usually associated with Facebook and the other networks makes health care professionals and patients hesitate while posting details.  While these exclusive health care and patient focused social networks have stringent privacy policies and makes the users feel secure about expressing their private information.