Enhancing health literacy and patient engagement through a privacy-aware social network-based digital health communication framework

Abstract

Digital health applications and social-network-enabled healthcare platforms have transformed healthcare delivery by facilitating health communication, patient engagement, and access to medical information. However, the continuous exchange of sensitive biomedical data across interconnected digital environments raises significant ethical, privacy, and security challenges that may compromise user trust and the effective adoption of digital health technologies. Existing studies primarily address individual security and privacy concerns, with limited attention to integrated frameworks that simultaneously support ethical data governance, secure communication, and digital health education. This study proposes a privacy-preserving digital health communication framework that integrates social-network-based healthcare applications with a multi-cloud infrastructure, distributing healthcare data and services across multiple independent cloud service providers to support system availability, reliability, fault tolerance, and secure information management. The proposed methodology combines a healthcare communication architecture, role-based access control, and stakeholder specific privacy policies to facilitate secure information exchange among patients, healthcare professionals, caregivers, and emergency responders while supporting the ethical handling of biomedical data. The framework is conceptually evaluated by analyzing healthcare communication workflows, user roles, privacy requirements, and security threats across representative healthcare communication scenarios, including chronic disease monitoring, emergency response, and post-discharge care coordination. This analysis suggests that the proposed framework may support secure information sharing, improve coordination among healthcare stakeholders, strengthen patient awareness and health literacy, and facilitate timely healthcare decision-making while preserving data confidentiality and user privacy. By integrating privacy-preserving mechanisms with digital health communication, the proposed framework is designed to support secure digital health education and public health promotion, contributing conceptually to Sustainable Development Goals 3 (Good Health and Well-being), 4 (Quality Education), and 17 (Partnerships for the Goals).