The Use of Social Media on Enhancing Dental Care and Practice Among Dental Professionals: Cross-Sectional Survey Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: As digitalization continues to advance globally, the health care sector, including dental practice, increasingly recognizes social media as a vital tool for health care promotion, patient recruitment, marketing, and communication strategies. Objective: This study aimed to investigate the use of social media and assess its impact on enhancing dental care and practice among dental professionals in the Philippines. Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted among dental practitioners in the Philippines. The study used a 23-item questionnaire, which included 5 questions on dentists' background and demographic information and 18 questions regarding the use, frequency, and purpose of social media in patient advising and quality of care improvement. Data were analyzed using SPSS software, with frequency distributions and χ2 tests used to assess the association between social media use and demographic variables and the impact on dental practice. Results: The 265 dental practitioners in this study were predominantly female (n=204, 77%) and aged between 20-30 years (n=145, 54.7%). Most of the participants were general practitioners (n=260, 98.1%) working in a private practice (n=240, 90.6%), with 58.5% (n=155) having 0-5 years of clinical experience. Social media use was significantly higher among younger practitioners (20-30 years old) compared to older age groups (P<.001), though factors such as sex, dental specialty, and years of clinical practice did not significantly influence use. The majority (n=179, 67.5%) reported using social media in their practice, primarily for oral health promotion and education (n=191, 72.1%), connecting with patients and colleagues (n=165, 62.3%), and marketing (n=150, 56.6%). Facebook (n=179, 67.5%) and YouTube (n=163, 61.5%) were the most frequented platforms for clinical information, with Twitter (subsequently rebranded X) being the least used (n=4, 1.5%). Despite widespread social media engagement, only 8.7% (n=23) trusted the credibility of web-based information, and 63.4% (n=168) perceived a potential impact on the patient-dentist relationship due to patients seeking information on the internet. Social media was also perceived to enhance practice quality, with users reporting significant improvements in patient care (P=.001). Conclusions: The findings highlight that social media is widely used among younger dental practitioners, primarily for education, communication, and marketing purposes. While social media use is associated with perceived improvements in practice quality and patient care, trust in information on social media remains low, and concerns remain regarding its effect on patient relationships. It is recommended to establish enhanced guidelines and provide reliable web-based resources to help dental practitioners use social media effectively and responsibly.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".