Social Media As A Research Tool
By Katie Wike, contributing writer
Facebook, Twitter could provide valuable data for research in patient behavior patterns related to healthcare
Social media in healthcare is most often used to reach out to patients and encourage them to be active, but one research team is taking it to a whole new level by using websites such as Facebook and Twitter to actually conduct research and compile data. The Boston Children’s Hospital and Merck have joined forces to use social media as a tool to better understand insomnia.
By using data from Twitter such as tweet content and time, as well as Facebook login times and comments, researchers hope to create a “portrait” of a patient’s daily activities and active times. As Health IT Analytics explains, “If the patient is complaining of sleeplessness at three in the morning, for example, when his daily routine requires him to be at work by 9 a.m., the researchers will be able to flag him as a likely candidate for follow-up from a primary care provider.”
“This project is using new data sources to carry out basic epidemiology research on sleep disorders and better understand the patient experience of insomnia,” John Brownstein, PhD, co-founder of HealthMap and member of Boston Children's Informatics Program, said in a release. “The social media content people produce could teach us a great deal about factors driving sleep disorders, and help uncover new populations of insomnia patients that haven’t yet been described.”
“We are very interested in pushing the boundaries of the science of social media and to see this as an opportunity to better understand the patient voice, in this case, how people share information about sleep problems and their day-to-day impact on quality of life,” added Sachin Jain, MD, MBA, chief medical information and innovation officer at Merck. “This data source could offer a powerful tool to monitor the sleep health of a city, state or country, and it may offer additional tools in the prevention or treatment of insomnia.”