Healthcare Social Media Analytics Product Released
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
Symplur, has unveiled its new digital analytics product – Symplur Signals – according to a company statement. The move reflects the growing level of interest in generating useful insights about how people are using and following Twitter across healthcare.
Co-founder Thomas Lee said, “Over the past five years, we have seen that the value of healthcare social media is no longer in question, now the focus is on ways to extract business and health insights from social engagement.”
Symplur released the product, in part, due to constant inquiries it receives as to what kind of articles specialists are reading, the rise and fall of certain conditions, who are the influential bloggers and what they’re talking about, and what’s trending among patient communities.
Pharmaceutical companies are among the leaders who are dipping into this wealth of information, developing social media teams that scan Twitter and other social media channels for relevant trends and information. However, it is also of significant interest to payers, researchers, and healthcare facilities which are increasingly depending on this information to get a better read of the patient populations they serve.
Symplur maintains the largest database of healthcare related Twitter conversations in existence via their role as the founder and curator of the globally recognized Healthcare Hashtag Project. Symplur has played a big role in popularizing healthcare hashtags for Twitter to guide people on Twitter looking for specific topic threads, conference conversations and people to follow. It’s recorded 512.9 million tweets spanning 10,000 healthcare topics.
Symplur can help large healthcare organizations, academic institutions, and medical associations wishing to gain business intelligence or to conduct formal research, by providing deep analytics on the details contained in this ever growing database of health discussions. In particular, Symplur Signals is designed to be directly used by these third parties, thereby allowing unprecedented hands-on access to this unique pool of information exchange.
Symplur’s website provides free access to numerous ways of gathering real time information on what healthcare topics are trending, but Signals is projected to take this insight to the next level. Think beyond mere metrics and into the realm of user behavior (network centrality), content analytics (sentiment analysis) and more.
Audun Utengen, co-founder of Symplur, explains, “Big data can be overwhelming, therefore, we designed this new subscription based model enabling our users easy access to more data points, and most importantly to interact directly with our system. We designed this new subscription-based model enabling our users easy access to more data points, and most importantly to interact directly with our system.”
Physician partner Dr. Howard Luks adds, “The Healthcare Hashtag Project has proven to be a tremendous resource for academics, healthcare practitioners, patients, conference organizers and virtual attendees alike as we follow, interact and learn from afar."