[Press release] Twitter the right prescription for sharing health research: UBC study
From the 14 February 2014 University of British Columbia press release
Using Twitter can help physicians be better prepared to answer questions from their patients, according to researchers from the University of British Columbia.
The study, presented today at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), finds more and more health care professionals are embracing social media. This challenges common opinion that physicians are reluctant to jump on the social media bandwagon.
“Many people go online for health information, but little research has been done on who is participating in these discussions or what is being shared,” says Julie Robillard, lead author and neurology professor at UBC’s National Core for Neuroethics and Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health.
Robillard and fourth-year psychology student Emanuel Cabral spent six months monitoring conversations surrounding stem cell research related to spinal cord injury and Parkinson’s disease on Twitter. They found roughly 25 per cent of the tweets about spinal cord injury and 15 per cent of the tweets about Parkinson’s disease were from health care professionals.
The study found the majority of tweets were about research findings, particularly the ones perceived as medical breakthroughs. The most shared content were links to research reports……
[Reblog] Use of Social Media Across US Hospitals: Descriptive Analysis of Adoption and Utilization
English: Infographic on how Social Media are being used, and how everything is changed by them. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
From the post at Full Text Reports
Source: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Background:
Use of social media has become widespread across the United States. Although businesses have invested in social media to engage consumers and promote products, less is known about the extent to which hospitals are using social media to interact with patients and promote health.Objective:
The aim was to investigate the relationship between hospital social media extent of adoption and utilization relative to hospital characteristics.Methods:
We conducted a cross-sectional review of hospital-related activity on 4 social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and Foursquare. All US hospitals were included that reported complete data for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey and the American Hospital Association Annual Survey. We reviewed hospital social media webpages to determine the extent of adoption relative to hospital characteristics, including geographic region, urban designation, bed size, ownership type, and teaching status. Social media utilization was estimated from user activity specific to each social media platform, including number of Facebook likes, Twitter followers, Foursquare check-ins, and Yelp reviews.Results:
Adoption of social media varied across hospitals with 94.41% (3351/3371) having a Facebook page and 50.82% (1713/3371) having a Twitter account. A majority of hospitals had a Yelp page (99.14%, 3342/3371) and almost all hospitals had check-ins on Foursquare (99.41%, 3351/3371). Large, urban, private nonprofit, and teaching hospitals were more likely to have higher utilization of these accounts.Conclusions:
Although most hospitals adopted at least one social media platform, utilization of social media varied according to several hospital characteristics. This preliminary investigation of social media adoption and utilization among US hospitals provides the framework for future studies investigating the effect of social media on patient outcomes, including links between social media use and the quality of hospital care and services.
Related articles
[News] Scientists say tweets predict heart disease and community health — Tech News and Analysis
Psychological Science / UPenn
Scientists say tweets predict heart disease and community health — Tech News and Analysis.
Excerpt from the 22 January 2015 article
University of Pennsylvania researchers have found that the words people use on Twitter can help predict the rate of heart disease deaths in the counties where they live. Places where people tweet happier language about happier topics show lower rates of heart disease death when compared with Centers for Disease Control statistics, while places with angry language about negative topics show higher rates.
The findings of this study, which was published in the journal Psychological Science, cut across fields such as medicine, psychology, public health and possibly even civil planning. It’s yet another affirmation that Twitter, despite any inherent demographic biases, is a good source of relatively unfiltered data about people’s thoughts and feelings,well beyond the scale and depth of traditional polls or surveys. In this case, the researchers used approximately 148 million geo-tagged tweets from 2009 and 2010 from more than 1,300 counties that contain 88 percent of the U.S. population.
(How to take full advantage of this glut of data, especially for business and governments, is something we’ll cover at our Structure Data conference with Twitter’s Seth McGuire and Dataminr’s Ted Bailey.)
What’s more, at the county level, the Penn study’s findings about language sentiment turn out to be more predictive of heart disease than any other individual factor — including income, smoking and hypertension. A predictive model combining language with those other factors was the most accurate of all.
That’s a result similar to recent research comparing Google Flu Trends with CDC data. Although it’s worth noting that Flu Trends is an ongoing project that has already been collecting data for years, and that the search queries it’s collecting are much more directly related to influenza than the Penn study’s tweets are to heart disease.
Related articles
[Press release] Can social media help stop the spread of HIV?
Pinmap of Tweets Related to HIV
Caption: This is a map showing the origins of tweets related to HIV.
Credit: Sean Young
Usage Restrictions: Credit required.
[Sean Young, Center for Digital Behavior at the University of California,
http://www.uclahealth.org/main.cfm?id=2341, scroll down for short bio]
From the 30 October 2014 UCLA press release
In addition to providing other potential benefits to public health, all of those tweets and Facebook posts could help curb the spread of HIV.
Although public health researchers have focused early applications of social media on reliably monitoring the spread of diseases such as the flu, Sean Young of the Center for Digital Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles, writes in an October 29th article in the Cell Press journal Trends in Microbiology of a future in which social media might predict and even change biomedical outcomes.
“We know that mining social media will have huge potential benefits for many areas of medicine in the future, but we’re still in the early stages of testing how powerful these technologies will be,” Young said.
With the right tools in place, he says, social media offers a rich source of psychological and health-related data generated in an environment in which people are often willing to share freely.
His recent work on Behavioral Insights on Big Data (BIBD) for HIV offers the tantalizing possibility that insights gleaned from social media could be used to help governments, public health departments, hospitals, and caretakers monitor people’s health behaviors “to know where, when, and how we might be able to prevent HIV transmission.”
Young details a social-media-based intervention in which African American and Latino men who have sex with men shared a tremendous amount of personal information through social media, including when or whether they had ‘come out,’ as well as experiences of homelessness and stigmatization. What’s more, they found that people who discussed HIV prevention topics on social media were more than twice as likely to later request an HIV test.
In the context of HIV prevention, tweets have also been shown to identify people who are currently or soon to engage in sexual- or drug-related risk behaviors. Those tweets can be mapped to particular locations and related to actual HIV trends.
What’s needed now is the updated infrastructure and sophisticated toolkits to handle all of those data, Young said, noting that there are about 500 million communications sent every day on Twitter alone. He and a team of University of California computer scientists are working to meet that challenge now.
Although privacy concerns about such uses of social media shouldn’t be ignored, Young says there is evidence that people have already begun to accept such uses of social media, even by corporations looking to boost profits.
“Since people are already getting used to the fact that corporations are doing this, we should at least support public health researchers in using these same methods to try and improve our health and well being,” he said. “We’re already seeing increased support from patients and public health departments.”
[Press release] Youth regularly receive pro-marijuana tweets
Researchers say pro-pot messages set stage for drug use
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 AUDIO: Twitter has become one of the most popular social media sites among young people, and researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have been looking at Twitter….
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Hundreds of thousands of American youth are following marijuana-related Twitter accounts and getting pro-pot messages several times each day, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found.
The tweets are cause for concern, they said, because young people are thought to be especially responsive to social media influences. In addition, patterns of drug use tend to be established in a person’s late teens and early 20s.
In a study published online June 27 in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, the Washington University team analyzed messages tweeted from May 1 through Dec. 31, 2013, by a Twitter account called Weed Tweets@stillblazintho. Among pro-marijuana accounts, this one was selected because it has the most Twitter followers — about 1 million. During the eight-month study period, the account posted an average of 11 tweets per day.
“As people are becoming more accepting of marijuana use and two states have legalized the drug for recreational use, it is important to remember that it remains a dangerous drug of abuse,” said principal investigator Patricia A. Cavazos-Rehg, PhD. “I’ve been studying what is influencing attitudes to change dramatically and where people may be getting messages about marijuana that are leading them to believe the drug is not hazardous.”
Although 19 states now allow marijuana use for medical purposes, much of the evidence for its effectiveness remains anecdotal. Even as Americans are relaxing their attitudes about marijuana, in 2011 marijuana contributed to more than 455,000 emergency room visits in the United States, federal research shows. Some 13 percent of those patients were ages 12 to 17.
A majority of Americans favor legalizing recreational use of the drug, and 60 percent of high school seniors report they don’t believe regular marijuana use is harmful. A recent report from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime said that more Americans are using cannabis as their perception of the health risk declines. The report stated that for youth and young adults, “more permissive cannabis regulations correlate with decreases in the perceived risk of use.”
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  IMAGE: This is another recent marijuana-related message from the Weed Tweets Twitter account.
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Cavazos-Rehg said Twitter also is influencing young people’s attitudes about the drug. Studying Weed Tweets, the team counted 2,285 tweets during the eight-month study. Of those, 82 percent were positive about the drug, 18 percent were either neutral or did not focus on marijuana, and 0.3 percent expressed negative attitudes about it.
Many of the tweets were meant to be humorous. Others implied that marijuana helps a person feel good or relax, and some mentioned different ways to get high.
With the help of a data analysis firm, the investigators found that of those receiving the tweets, 73 percent were under 19. Fifty-four percent were 17 to 19 years old, and almost 20 percent were 16 or younger. About 22 percent were 20 to 24 years of age. Only 5 percent of the followers were 25 or older.
“These are risky ages when young people often begin experimentation with drugs,” explained Cavazos-Rehg, an assistant professor of psychiatry. “It’s an age when people are impressionable and when substance-use behaviors can transition into addiction. In other words, it’s a very risky time of life for people to be receiving messages like these.”
Cavazos-Rehg said it isn’t possible from this study to “connect the dots” between positive marijuana tweets and actual drug use, but she cites previous research linking substance use to messages from television and billboards. She suggested this also may apply to social media.
“Studies looking at media messages on traditional outlets like television, radio, billboards and magazines have shown that media messages can influence substance use and attitudes about substance use,” she said. “It’s likely a young person’s attitudes and behaviors may be influenced when he or she is receiving daily, ongoing messages of this sort.”
The researchers also learned that the Twitter account they tracked reached a high number of African-Americans and Hispanics compared with Caucasians. Almost 43 percent were African-American, and nearly 12 percent were Hispanic. In fact, among Hispanics, Weed Tweets ranked in the top 30 percent of all Twitter accounts followed.
“It was surprising to see that members of these minority groups were so much more likely than Caucasians to be receiving these messages,” Cavazos-Rehg said, adding that there is particular concern about African-Americans because their rates of marijuana abuse and dependence are about twice as high as the rate in Caucasians and Hispanics.
The findings point to the need for a discussion about the pro-drug messages young people receive, Cavazos-Rehg said.
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AUDIO: Twitter has become one of the most popular social media sites among young people, and researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have been looking at Twitter….
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“There are celebrities who tweet to hundreds of thousands of followers, and it turns out a Twitter handle that promotes substance use can be equally popular,” she said. “Because there’s not much regulation of social media platforms, that could lead to potentially harmful messages being distributed. Regulating this sort of thing is going to be challenging, but the more we can provide evidence that harmful messages are being received by vulnerable kids, the more likely it is we can have a discussion about the types of regulation that might be appropriate.”
How Twitter Can Revolutionize Public Health
by Catherine Bartlett, MPH student
credit: connection.sagepub.com
As much as people may try to deny it, traditionally healthcare organizations are rarely early adopters of new technologies. The lack of electronic health systems, computerized methods of communication, filing, and overall resistance to change has left many health care organizations years behind other high tech industries.
Public health officials have used many different strategies to engage the general public, from billboards, radio PSAs, to the CDC’s unique “prepare for the zombie apocalypse” web campaign. Although some may dismiss Twitter as frivolous or silly, it is an excellent platform to educate and communicate with a large group of people in a succinct way (140 characters to be exact). Indeed, over the past five years, Twitter has become one of the most popular social media and sharing platforms in the world. According to the Twitter blog, more than 500 million tweets are…
View original post 248 more words
The Online Blues—Is There A Relationship Between Social Media And Mental Well-Being?
Anxious
Unsettled
Disheartened
Irritable
Stressed
Frustrated
Drained
We all experience the above states from time to time as a result of our work environments. I know I did, which prompted a midlife career shift from clinical to nonclinical medicine.
So imagine my surprise to feel these emotions resurface during my year of playing hooky to write.
WHAT GIVES?
Recently, after an irritable self-pity party summoned Mr. Nasty Pants, my dreaded personality imp, I tugged at the stripes on his pants and said, “What the crap? I’ve spent my day glued to a laptop yet have little product to show for my efforts.”
My personality imp, Mr. Nasty Pants
My impish nemesis danced his evil two-step and laughed. “Oh, what’s de matter. Is wittle, baby Carrie’s plan not going her way?”
I sighed, closed my laptop, and assumed a supine position on the floor, hoping to soothe the twisted knot in my back. Then I accessed my left brain for analysis. What exactly was going on here?
- Was it the writing process itself? My neurons fired a quick no in response.
- Was it guilt over playing hooky from medicine? Eh, maybe a little, but not completely.
- Was it the fact that my writing progress did not match my timeline? Bingo.
Okay, so if that was the source of my angst, what was the root?
At this point, Mr. Nasty Pants leaped onto my stomach and resumed his jig. “Twiddle dee, twiddle dum, you spend too much time online, my stupid chum.”
Hmm, my fashion-challenged demon might have a point.
ENTER PUBMED
Naturally, my first impulse was research. Are there studies to suggest too much online media is associated with psychological distress?
The concept makes sense; it doesn’t take millions of funding dollars to see that. Plus, I’ve read reams of pediatric literature discussing social media’s harmful effects on kids. But what about adults?
Show me the studies, man.
Here’s some of what I found:
- Media Multitasking is Associated with Symptoms of Depression and Social Anxiety: Given the title says it all, I see no reason to elaborate.
- Internet-Related Psychosis−A Sign of the Times: Well, now, that doesn’t sound good. In this study, too much social media involving ‘hyperpersonal’ relationships with strangers resulted in negative feelings. And delusions. (That’s the psychosis part, folks). For more information on this pleasant thought, see the aptly named article Can Facebook Drive You Crazy – Literally?
- Study: People Who Are Constantly Online Can Develop Mental Disorders (Abstract here): Um, yeah…again, pretty self-explanatory. But in addition to depression, this study also found sleep disorders and poor ergonomics (improper body positioning). One of the main culprits is that in an online world that’s 24/7, people never feel free. Furthermore, if they neglect their social media, feelings of guilt surface.
Kind of like when you don’t get to everyone’s blog posts, right?
NOW WHAT?
So what’s a bloke to do? Especially if said bloke uses social media not only for interaction but also as a marketing tool.
One needn’t be a genius to answer that. As Mr. Nasty Pants would say, jumping off each of our heads in gleeful spitefulness, “Turn off the endless black holes.”
But we know it’s not that easy. We want and need to maintain the interaction. But we also need to get work done and meet our personal deadlines. Finding that balance is the ever-elusive golden goose, is it not?
For my own self, I know I need to cut back. I only post once a week, and as such, perhaps I’ll only be able to visit other blogs once a week. And less Twitter. And Facebook. And forums. And…
When I have the answers, I’ll let you know…
What about you? Do you ever get the online blues? Are you able to cut back without guilt?
All images from Microsoft Clip Art
Sifting Social Media for Early Signs of Adverse Drug Reactions
From the 21 September 2012 article at Science Daily
The National Science Foundation has awarded a $130,000 grant to a team co-led by University of Virginia professor Ahmed Abbasi to fund research that will analyze social media, including tweets and online discussion forums, to identify adverse drug reactions — a process that promises to be much faster and perhaps also more accurate than the existing methods of identifying such reactions.
Currently, once drugs come to market, the FDA relies upon consumers to report adverse side-effects through physicians and other official reporting channels.
The new project, Abbasi explained, will build on related research, currently in publication in the journal ACM Transactions on Information Systems, that demonstrated the promise of social media as an early-warning system for adverse drug reactions. Abbasi and his co-authors retrospectively analyzed four types of public online media (websites, blogs, Web forums and social networking sites) posted from 2000 to early 2012 and were able to identify hundreds of thousands of documents containing adverse drug reaction-related information. The preliminary results suggest that these documents can accurately provide warnings earlier — in some cases, years earlier — than existing channels…
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With nearly 10 billion new tweets produced every month, Abbasi said, social media presents a classic “big data” challenge: sifting through terabytes of noisy data to siphon out the nuggets of relevant and reliable information. With social media, information quality is always a concern; a single hypochondriac might produce dozens of unreliable reports of drug side-effects, he noted.
Online medical information is also plagued by medical Web spam: countless pages of medical misinformation designed to exploit consumer fears and sell unregulated remedies ranging from herbal remedies for arthritis to anti-aging skin creams, Abbasi said. Experts estimate that more than 20 percent of all medical information on the Web is spam.
Fortunately, Abbasi comes well-prepared for that challenge. He co-developed an award-winning fraudulent-website detection system able to detect fake medical websites with 94 percent accuracy…..
Related articles
- Sifting Social Media for Early Signs of Adverse Drug Reactions (engineeringevil.com)
- ADR (Adverse Drug Reactions), The Number 6 Killer of Americans! (georgefebish.wordpress.com)
- Adverse Drug Reactions a Major Cause of Unplanned Hospitalizations of Elderly Veterans (ahrq.gov)
- Reporting Adverse Reactions to Psychiatric Drugs – How Doctors and Regulators Fail Us (madinamerica.com)
Like It or Not, Facebook and Friends Can Be Used to Influence Health Behavior
From the 5th July 2012 article at Science News Daily
Most people call it the “art” of persuasion, but public health researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) are trying to pinpoint the “science” behind social influence….
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Valente, whose research focuses on social networks and influence, has compiled a collection of methods that public health advocates use to stimulate changes in behavior and explains why certain methods may be more effective than others in particular situations. The analysis appears in the July 6 edition of the peer-reviewed journal Science, the world’s leading outlet for scientific news, commentary and research.
Due to the large number of interventions available to researchers — Valente identifies 24, each with at least several variations — the researcher says a more robust framework is needed for deciding which tactics are best used in particular settings.
Word-of-mouth interventions, for example, depend on the social network to succeed. In some cases, word of mouth is used to spread the word and in other cases to create groups of like-minded friends.
“Existing evidence indicates that network interventions are quite effective,” Valente writes. “Yet, the science of how networks can be used to accelerate behavior change and improve organizational performance is still in its infancy. Research is clearly needed to compare different network interventions to determine which are optimal under what circumstances.”
Valente notes that behavioral research is often used in marketing and business arenas; the public health sector is just beginning to implement that information as tools like Facebook and Twitter have made it easier to collect data and spread information, he says…
Related articles
- Like it or not, Facebook and friends can be used to influence health behavior (eurekalert.org)
- “Identifying Influential and Susceptible Members of Social Networks” – Science Mag (brain4biz.wordpress.com)
- The ABC’s of Converting Social Media Into Word-of-Mouth Marketing (openforum.com)
- Identifying, Understanding and Influencing Social Media Users [Infographic] (mindjumpers.com)
- Women’s Facebook Recommendations Spur More Likes From Men – Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
- Jure Klepic: Paradox of Online Influence (huffingtonpost.com)
- The Democratization of Social Influence (forbes.com)
A healthy look at social media
From the 10 May 2012 Medical News Today article
Can social media solve the US healthcare crisis?
The creation of a social media videoconferencing platform geared towards healthcare might pave the way for enhanced use of social media in the world of healthcare according to a study published this month in the International Journal of Electronic Finance.
Peter DeVries of the Department of Finance, Accounting, and CIS, at the University of Houston – Downtown, explains that despite the advent of social media tools and accessible mobile communications devices, the patient-doctor relationship has changed little. DeVries suggests that innovative use of social media might improve that relationship as well as the healthcare industry as a whole not only by reducing inefficiencies but by making healthcare provision and advice more immediate and engaging at lower cost. DeVries suggests that from the perspective of healthcare providers social media might also open up new revenue streams that could bolster an industry currently in economic turmoil.
DeVries points out that many industries are using social media to improve the customer and user experience and to provide social interaction among like-minded individuals. The popularity of Twitter and Facebook, which is fast approaching 1 billion worldwide users, is testament to the power social media might wield and the opportunities it could bring. “We are seeing companies linking to social media sites from their corporate websites to form closer relationships with their customers,” says DeVries. In his paper, he offers healthcare providers several pointers as to how they might engage their customers, the patients, through social media with a view to not only improving medical provision but improving the company finances too.
Two aspects of social media that might revolutionize healthcare provision lie in the relationships between patients, the relationships between physicians and perhaps most importantly the relationships between the two. If social media can enable patients to share information with other patients and to gain knowledge and at the same time give physicians the ability to share and learn from their peers more readily, then the meshing of these two threads could make for better informed connections between patients and their physicians too.
DeVries cites the Association of American Medical Colleges on how there is likely to be a 124,000 shortfall of full-time physicians in the USA by 2025, while there will be a need for almost 140,000 family physicians by 2020 if Americans are to have adequate access to primary healthcare.
The projected shortage of physicians demands innovation in the healthcare industry, says DeVries. “Doctors and hospitals must find ways to provide healthcare in more productive and efficient ways,” he adds. “If a growing number of patients are finding themselves as users of Web 2.0, then Web 2.0 might be the answer to alleviate the forecasted overcrowding.”
Related articles
- Can Social Media Solve The US Healthcare Crisis? (medicalnewstoday.com)
- Physicians Leveraging Social Media to Educate Patients (bjconquest.com)
- Healthcare Social Media: Healing or Hurting? (tedkolota.com)
More health departments nationwide embracing social media: Use of tools rises
From the Nation’s Health (May/June 2012)
From a Boston campaign that uses online videos to talk to teens about sugary drink consumption to an oversized Louisiana stork who reaches out via Facebook and Twitter about healthy pregnancies, health departments around the nation are embracing social media as a new way to connect with the public.
Social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube offer health professionals the ability to deliver public health messages — from common-sense guidance to critical information during an emergency — directly and quickly. Because of its low cost and ease of use, more and more health departments are becoming involved in social media, with some campaigns earning both recognition and avid followers…..
Related articles
- Physicians Leveraging Social Media to Educate Patients (bjconquest.com)
Medical Researchers Tune Into the Internet Buzz
Medical Researchers Tune Into the Internet Buzz – WSJ.com
From the 16 April edition of the Wall Street Journal
Looking for medical information on Internet message boards can be risky for consumers. Some of it is confusing, misleading or downright wrong. But for medical researchers, all that chatter can yield some valuable insights.
Scientists from the University of Pennsylvania, for example, are mining message boards and Twitter feeds to see what breast-cancer and prostate-cancer patients are saying about herbal and nutritional supplements—including whether they take them and why and what side effects they encounter.
“People are often hesitant to talk to their doctors about herbs and supplements. But they do talk with other people, especially in an anonymous setting like a discussion board,” says principal investigator John Holmes, an epidemiologist and medical-information specialist. Even if there is no scientific evidence to support what people post, he says, “it’s useful to identify areas that would merit further study with all scientific rigor.”…
….
Chatter on the Web also can serve as an early warning sign of adverse events linked to drugs or medical devices. “We see patient conversations on the Internet as the largest post-marketing study ever,” says Michele Bennett, chief operating officer of Wool Labs, a business-intelligence company founded in 2007. The Wayne, Pa., firm can search the entire Internet for conversations that shed light on patient beliefs, buying patterns or decision making—whatever its clients, many of them drug companies, are seeking. Wool Labs also can search Web chatter retrospectively to see how attitudes changed over time…
…
Analyzing Web conversations does raise ethical and privacy issues; people who talk candidly about their medical problems online may not realize it is a public forum. That is why the Penn researchers mine only discussion sites that require participants to register and explicitly state in their terms of use that any information posted will become public. The programs also filter out any posts or tweets placed by “bots” that are advertisements in disguise; containing a URL to another site is a telltale sign
The team also devised an “anonymizer” program that scrubs out any names, locations or other identifiers…
Related articles
- Social media and medical research, a story from Oz (simondenegri.com)
Domestic Violence and Social Media (from the Health Is Social Blog)
Something to consider, if you tweet today, or connect to someone via another social media tool (as Facebook)…
remember there are people who fear to connect because they are being stalked by people with controlling intentions…
From the 8 November 2010 Health Is Social Blog item Domestic Violence and Social Media
Note: If you are a victim of domestic violence, please be sure you are safe accessing the Internet. If you have an emergency, dial 911 or the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE(7233). To leave this site immediately, click here.
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE IN A DIGITALLY CONNECTED WORLD
This blog is dedicated, among other things, to exploring the intersection of health and social media. It swings its angle around different perspectives: from marketing to professional awareness of technology to the healthcare implications of the very existence of social media in our lives.
So I’m going to use this platform to talk about and raise questions about domestic violence in a world that is increasingly being overtaken by social media….
…
You see, not everybody is in exactly the same position as everyone else when it comes to social media – its use and its access.
A newly diagnosed cancer patient is in an entirely different situation from a woman whose husband or boyfriend abuses her. The former doesn’t have to worry about a husband who stalks her every move; implants spyware on her computer; and threatens to kill her if she tells anybody else what’s going on.
A tweet, or a check-in, could be as effectively dangerous as a bullet.
Violence isn’t just a physical act: its a violation, one which ranges from subtle manipulation to implicit threatening and emotional terrorizing to murder.
And therein lies the peculiar challenges of domestic violence and social media. If social media is – as is claimed – Social, then there are specific social ramifications to be considered in the context of domestic violence.
On one hand, victims of domestic violence need support and resources and the information needed to acquire them.
On the other, abusers often go to any length to control their victims. Their insecurity with themselves is so deep – so out of their own control – that they seek control and security in the emotional and visceral pain of others.
So what does a victim do when the abuser dominates so much that social media isn’t much of a safe option?…..
Related Resources
- Domestic Violence (MedlinePlus) links to trusted information in topics as overviews, coping, directories, organizations, and more
- Dating Violence(National Center for Victims of Crime)
- Domestic Violence Frequently Asked Questions(Rural Assistance Center)
- Violence against Women: Safety Planning(Dept. of Health and Human Services, Office on Women’s Health)
- Teenagers
- Abuse(Nemours Foundation)
- Teen Dating Violence(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
- Men
- Domestic Violence against Men: Know the Signs, Seek Help(Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research)
- Men’s Health: Violence Prevention(Dept. of Health and Human Services, Office on Women’s Health)Domestic Violence against Women: Recognize Patterns, Seek Help(Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research)
- Seniors
- Domestic Violence: Older Women Can Be Victims Too(National Center on Elder Abuse) – PDF
- enditnow.gov(Dept. of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women)Related articles
- He beat you and said, “I’m sorry, let’s try it again -You said, “OK”. WHY? (youneedtowriteabook.com)
- Activists assail Rittenhouse eatery for tasteless sign (philly.com)
- Domestic Violence Weekly (laviniathompsonauthor.wordpress.com)
- Salon Uses Domestic Violence Imagery to Advertise (bellasugar.com)
- ‘Domestic violence not criminalised by Senate’ (nation.com.pk)
- Beauty Cares Provides Makeover Services For Domestic Violence Victims (bellasugar.com)
Using Twitter to deliver health improvement messages
Using Twitter to deliver health improvement messages
From KevinMD.com, Mon Feb 13, 2012
I have decided to spam for public health.
Phone calls, text messaging, and even apps have been shown to help improve health and sustain behavior change, even in people suffering from profound mental illness. But when it comes to using these tools for public health, there are two problems. The first is that each message (whether via phone call or text) costs money. The second is that it’s quite hard to use those platforms for blasting messages to a whole population.
Read the rest of Using Twitter to deliver health improvement messages on KevinMD.com.
Related articles
- The Text Message Era (mycricket.com)
- [Infographic] One in Five People Have Broken Up via Text Message (readwriteweb.com)
- HEALTHeME Launches Stress Reduction By Text Messaging; Research Shows 60% of Users Slashed Stress Levels (prweb.com)
Infographic: How Social Media affects our Brain?
From the 13 December blog posting at Assisted Living Today
http://assistedlivingtoday.com/p/resources/social-media-is-ruining-our-minds-infographic/
Social media use across the globe has exploded. As more and more people flock to social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus, it’s becoming clear that social media is having a profound effect on not just our lives but on our brains too. Scientists are researching how social media impacts cognitive functions and development, like multitasking skills, our ability (or inability) to focus, how our brains are getting rewired, to name a few. All of which appear to be drastically affected by social media participation. To help shed more light on this phenomenon, we’ve created this infographic: “How Social Media is Ruining Our Minds.” We encourage you to share it on your favorite social media sites (ironic, huh?). You also can embed the infographic on your website using the code below. We ask only that you credit us, Assisted Living Today the leader in finding top assisted living facilities, as the source.
Ethics Forum Speaker KevinMD: Social Media Gives Doctors a Voice
Posted on November 9th, 2011 by Erica NoonanWe recently caught up with Dr. Kevin Pho, MD, a Boston University-trained internist now practicing in Nashua, NH. His website, KevinMD.com, is one of the Internet’s top sites for physician commentary and news.
Dr. Pho is a featured speaker at the Massachusetts Medical Society’s Ethics Forum,“Social Media and Medicine: the Impact on Your Patients, Your Practice, and You,” onFriday, Dec. 2, 2011, from 3:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.
MMS: Why should physicians get involved with social media?
Dr. Pho: We know that social media is important to patients. A Pew study says that 8 out of 10 of Internet users are online looking for medical information, but only 25 percent of them check the source of what they find. There is lots of bad information out there. I’ll be making the case for doctors to be online, guiding patients to good information.
Another reason is that social media is gives doctors a voice in national debates they didn’t have 5 or 10 years ago. With these (social media) platforms, we can introduce topics we think are important to a wide audience.
MMS: Many doctors say they just don’t feel comfortable with social media sharing sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Dr. Pho: Doctors need an online presence and digital footprint. Patients will be looking for them online, and gone are the days where they will be using the phone book. I tell people, you really need to control your own social media presence….
Related item
Using Social Media For Practicing Evidence Based Medicine Cochrane Social Media Workshop 2011 (slideshare presentation)
Social Media Discussion On Cardiac Arrest Reveals New Avenues For Public Health Education
From the 15 November 2011 Medical News Today article
Discussion about cardiac arrest on Twitter is common and represents a new opportunity to provide lifesaving information to the public, according to new research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The Penn investigators presented two studies (ReSS Abstracts #52 and #53) examining cardiac arrest-information exchange on the social media site today at the American Heart Association‘s annual Scientific Sessions.
The Penn researchers evaluated cardiac arrest- and resuscitation-related Tweets during a month-long period in the spring of 2011 and discovered that users frequently share information about CPR and automated external defibrillators (AEDs) and discuss resuscitation topics in the news. Although their findings indicate that use of the platform to ask questions about cardiac arrest appears to be only in its infancy, the authors suggest that Twitter represents a unique, promising avenue to respond to queries from the public and disseminate information about this leading killer – particularly in the areas of CPR training and lifesaving interventions like therapeutichypothermia. …
Related articles
- Twitter as a Lifesaver (psychcentral.com)
- Can Twitter save lives? (eurekalert.org)
- 5 Things Twitter Tells Us About Our Health (huffingtonpost.com)
- Need For New Training Strategies, Dissemination Of Information About Latest CPR Techniques And Guidelines For The Public (medicalnewstoday.com)
- Members of the public lack skills, confidence necessary to save lives with CPR, Penn research shows (eurekalert.org)
- Sudden Cardiac Arrest Coalition Issues a Call to Action: Take a Stand Against Sudden Cardiac Arrest — Set for October 26 on Capitol Hill (prweb.com)
- Only a third of US state police agencies equip cars with AEDs (eurekalert.org)
New Study Shows Online Dependency Increasing, Tips on Reducing Online Dependency
From the 26 July 2011 Medical News Today article
If you are reading this right now, you’re online. It is estimated that there were 2.1 billion Internet users worldwide, but what would happen if suddenly we were all unplugged and offline, back to basics if you will?
In a new survey of 1,000 people, 53% said they felt upset when they were denied access to the Internet, and 40% said they felt lonely when they were unable to log on to the World Wide Web. Participants were questioned about their attitudes towards the Internet, and were asked to go without technology for 24 hours. That meant no Facebook, Twitter, emails and text messages.
After the 24 hours were up, some volunteers compared the experience to quitting smoking or drinking, and one even described it as “having my hand chopped off.”
Read the rest of the article, including suggestions on how to reduce your dependency on the Web.
Related articles
- Does using Facebook put you at more risk elsewhere on the internet? (nakedsecurity.sophos.com)
- Facebook, Twitter users are more trusting finds study (news.bioscholar.com)
- The move towards social 2.0: mirroring our offline and online social behaviour (econsultancy.com)
- Report: Facebook Users hate the new Chat (magnaefamae.com)
Tracking Public Health Trends With Twitter
From the 7 July 2011 Medical News Today article
Twitter allows millions of social media fans to comment in 140 characters or less on just about anything: an actor’s outlandish behavior, an earthquake’s tragic toll or the great taste of a grilled cheese sandwich.
But by sifting through this busy flood of banter, is it possible to also track important public health trends? Two Johns Hopkins University computer scientists would respond with a one-word tweet: “Yes!”
Mark Dredze and Michael J. Paul fed 2 billion public tweets posted between May 2009 and October 2010 into computers, then used software to filter out the 1.5 million messages that referred to health matters. Identities of the tweeters were not collected by Dredze, a researcher at the university’s Human Language Technology Center of Excellence and an assistant research professor of computer science, and Paul, a doctoral student. ….
….”Our goal was to find out whether Twitter posts could be a useful source of public health information, ” Dredze said. “We determined that indeed, they could. In some cases, we probably learned some things that even the tweeters’ doctors were not aware of, like which over-the-counter medicines the posters were using to treat their symptoms at home.”By sorting these health-related tweets into electronic “piles,” Dredze and Paul uncovered intriguing patterns about allergies, flu cases, insomnia, cancer, obesity, depression, pain and other ailments. ….
…Other tweets pointed to misuse of medicine. “We found that some people tweeted that they were taking antibiotics for the flu,” Paul said. “But antibiotics don’t work on the flu, which is a virus, and this practice could contribute to the growing antibiotic resistance problems. So these tweets showed us that some serious medical misperceptions exist out there.”
Nonprofit health organizations increase health literacy through social media
From a 4 May 2011 Medical News Today item
ScienceDaily (May 4, 2011) — As the presence of social media continues to increase as a form of communication, health organizations are searching for the most effective ways to use the online tools to pass important information to the public. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have found that nonprofit organizations and community groups appear to be more actively engaged in posting health information and interacting with the public on Twitter than other types of health-related organizations, such as health business corporations, educational institutions and government agencies.
“Twitter may be more appealing to nonprofit organizations because it creates a barrier-free environment that allows these organizations to share important information through real-time exchanges without significant efforts,” said Hyojung Park, a doctoral candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism. “Unlike business organizations such as pharmaceutical companies, nonprofit health organizations and advocacy groups may suffer from lack of funding, staff, and other resources in developing and implementing communication strategies for health intervention and promotion programs. Thus, it is likely that nonprofit organizations and support groups recognize the rapid growth of Twitter and its value as an inexpensive but highly effective communication tool.”…
Related Articles
- Nonprofit health organizations increase health literacy through social media (scienceblog.com)
- Is Your Nonprofit Organization Ready for Social Media? (blogs.constantcontact.com)
- How to Create Your Nonprofit Organization’s Listening and Engagement System with Social Media (hubspot.com)
- Join Us for a Series of Social Media Marketing Webinars and Twitter Chats (blogs.constantcontact.com)
- Central Iowa Nonprofits Using Social Media (iowabiz.com)
- CDC Launches New Health Literacy Website (aa47.wordpress.com)
Social Media Has Benefits And Risks For Kids
Social Media Has Benefits And Risks For Kids
From the March 28 2011 Health News Today item
While social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube bring benefits to children and teenagers, such as helping them develop communication and technical skills, they can also expose them to danger and risk, such as cyberbullying and depression, according to a new report written by American pediatricians.
The report, which appears in the April issue of Pediatrics, [free full text] the peer-reviewed, scientific journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), says doctors are in an ideal position to encourage children to use social media in a healthy way, and to help parents and families understand and engage with their use of social media while also monitoring for potential problems….
…The report does much to stress the benefits of social media, such as developing communication skills, facilitating social interaction and improving technical competence. Other benefits include helping young people find opportunities to link up with community activity like volunteering, and helping them attain a sense of identity…
…A Common Sense Media Poll in 2009 found that more than half of American teenagers log onto their favorite social media site at least once a day, while 22% do so at least ten times a day.75% of teenagers now own cellphones, with 54% of them using them for texting, 24% for instant messaging, and 25% for social media access.
The growth of social media has been so rapid and their presence in children’s everyday life is now so pervasive, that:
“For some teens and tweens, social media is the primary way they interact socially, rather than at the mall or a friend’s house,” report co-author Dr Gwenn O’Keeffe told the press.
“Parents need to understand these technologies so they can relate to their children’s online world – and comfortably parent in that world,” urged O’Keeffe.
O’Keeffe and colleagues point out that a significant part of young people’s social and emotional development now occurs while they are using the Internet or on their cellphones.
Related Articles
- Today’s Kids Face ‘Facebook Depression’ (livescience.com)
- How Marketers Are Using Social Media to Grow (othersidegroup.com)
- NLM Director’s Comments Transcript: Kids & Social Media 05/02/2011 (US National Library of Medicine)
Physicians on Twitter
From the Dr. Shock MD PhD Blog
In the latest issue of the JAMA the results of a survey is published. The authors did a search on physicians using twitter. They extracted the public profile pages of the physicians using twitter with 500 or more followers between May 1 and May 31, 2010. They analyzed the tweets of these professionals.
Of the 5156 tweets analyzed, 49% (2543) were health or medical related, 21% (1082) were personal communications, 14% (703) were retweets, and 58% (2965) contained links. Seventy-three tweets (1%) recommended a medical product or proprietary service, 634 (12%) were self-promotional, and 31 (1%) were related to medical education.
But what is somewhat worrying were their findings of potential patient privacy violations andconflicts of interest. Thirty-eight tweets (0.7%) represented potential patient privacy violations, of the 27 users responsible for these privacy violations 25 were identifiable by full name on the profile, by photo or link to their personal website. Twelve tweets were about a product they were selling on their Web site or repeatedly promoting specific health products, 10 were statements about treatments not supported by the official guidelines.
Using social media by physicians does broadcast useful medical information, unprofessional content in tweets by physicians is rare.
Chretien KC, Azar J, & Kind T (2011). Physicians on twitter. JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association, 305 (6), 566-8 PMID: 21304081 ***
*** The abstract of this article may be found here.
For suggestions on how to get the full text of this article (letter to the editor) for free or at low cost, click here
FEMA will use social media through all stages of a disaster
Image via Wikipedia
FEMA will use social media through all stages of a disaster
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is set up to use Twitter at all stages of a disaster, before the event strikes, during the event and after, Administrator Craig Fugate tells Nextgov.
The agency maintains a Twitter page with just under 30,000 followers, and the administrator himself has a personal page, CraigatFEMA, with almost 6,600 followers.
Before a forecast storm hits, today’s FEMA can monitor local weather reports and Tweets to advise the public in the affected area. On Tuesday, for example, the agency issued a message about a winter storm likely to hit Oklahoma, New Mexico and North Texas through Wednesday. The agency instructed its followers to be sure to follow the affected state’s emergency management offices: “Another #winterstorm for OK, north TX & New Mexico tonight/tmrw. Prepare at http://go.usa.gov/akw & follow @okem @txdps @NMDHSEM.”
Fugate said his agency is careful to rely only on official information, such as forecasts from the National Weather Service and links from official emergency management agencies. “It’s really important I don’t try to pose as a weather service,” he said.
The agency also uses social media to anticipate what a state might need to prepare for a predicted disaster. For example, as Hurricane Earl moved up the East Coast in September 2010, Fugate could see by monitoring Twitter that tourists on North Carolina’s Outer Banks were evacuating, but many long-term residents were adamant about staying put. That gave the agency a heads-up that there would be people left on the barrier islands, and search and rescue plans were readied.
During an event, FEMA looks for what people are saying on Twitter by tracking the service’s hash tags***, which an eventual consensus of users assigns to mark a given event. During the major snow and ice storm that moved across the United States in early February, the most commonly used hash tag was #snomg……
Here is an explanation of Twitter hashtags (from Twitter)
Definition: The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. It was created organically by Twitter users as a way to categorize messages.
Hashtags: helping you find interesting Tweets
- People use the hashtag symbol # before relevant keywords in their Tweet to categorize those Tweets to show more easily in Twitter Search.
- Clicking on a hashtagged word in any message shows you all other Tweets in that category.
- Hashtags can occur anywhere in the Tweet.
- Hashtagged words that become very popular are often Trending Topics.
Example: Below, @VegNews added the hashtag before the word “vegan” in their message. The word is now a link to search results for all Tweets containing “#vegan” in the message.
Using hashtags
- If Tweet with a hashtag on a public account, anyone who does a search for that hashtag may find your Tweet.
- Don’t #spam #with #hashtags. Don’t over-tag a single Tweet. (Best practicesrecommend using no more than 3 hashtags per Tweet.)
- Use hashtags only on Tweets relevant to the topic.
Further Discovery and Reading
- The third party site hashtag.org offers an overview of popular hashtags used on Twitter. Find out about trends, look at small, pretty graphs, and search to see if the hashtags of your fantasies exist.
- You may also want to read this article about hashtags, which appeared in The New Yorker magazine.
Related Articles
- Twitter and natural disasters (eurekalert.org)
- NLM Director’s Comments Transcript: Rising Expectations for Emergency Response? 04/18/2011
- FEMA Administrator on GIS and Social Media for Emergency Management (geodatapolicy.wordpress.com)
- FEMA chief says economy adds to storm challenges (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
- Social Media Tends To Be A One-Way Communication For FEMA (techdailydose.nationaljournal.com)
- “FEMA’s Twitter Followers Can Get Arkansas Disaster Recovery Updates” and related posts (fema.gov)
- Social Rescue: Facebook, Twitter Change Disaster Response (time.com)
- How Social Media Is Changing Disaster Response (time.com)
- Mobile Apps, Facebook, Twitter Help Public Become Part Of Disaster Preparedness And Response, Not ‘Mere Bystanders’ (Medical News Today July 2011)
“Social media tools like Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare may be an important key to improving the public health system’s ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters, according to a New England Journal of Medicine“Perspective” article from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania to be published this week. From earthquakes to oil spills or other industrial accidents to weather-related events like heat waves and flooding, the authors suggest that harnessing crowd-sourcing technologies and electronic communications tools will set the stage to handle emergencies in a quicker, more coordinated, effective way. …”
Health care hashtags – a social project to organize tweets
Have you noticed that some twitter messages include hastags (as “#baseball”)? These symbols are entered by tweeters to identify the subjects of their messages. So, if you search twitter with ” #baseball”, you will only get tweets that include include “#baseball ” and are about baseball.
The medical web site builder Fox epractice is proposing that health and medical hashtags be better organized for improved retrieval of twitter messages.
(Click here for a calendar of Health Tweet Chats!)
An excerpt from the Fox ePractice proposal
Since I started using Twitter I’ve felt that so many of us who wish to meet other people interested in healthcare and who wish to participate in the many healthcare related conversations have been kept apart because of what should be a common language … hashtags. With that in mind, we at Fox ePractice have embarked upon an ambitious project. One in which we are searching for the many Twitter hashtags that are in use that are specific to the field of healthcare, and to organize that data in some of the following ways …
**Allow exploration by either hashtag or healthcare subject matter.
**Show hashtags that are related to one another in the healthcare field.
**Demonstrate frequency of use of related hashtags so as to facilitate hashtag selection.
**Identify most frequent users and most frequent @mentions with each hashtag so as to find the influencers to follow on your healthcare topic of choice.
**Determine which healthcare hashtags overall are most popular at any given time.
**To provide a live feed of conversations related to each hashtag so as to easily explore what’s currently being shared on Twitter in your healthcare topic of choice.
**To encourage visitors to vote on which hashtags are most useful in hopes of bringing multiple conversations together. (example: #pediatric, #pediatrics, #pediatrician, #pediatricians)
Our hope is that we can lower the barriers of entry, decrease the learning curve, and enhance the experience of new users. But we’d also like to introduce experienced healthcare Twitter users to a fresh look, to new information, and to new people who share your passions.
We’re already working on future features based on some pre-release discussions with several well respected individuals in our Twitter healthcare community. Establishing methods for more visitor input that can be shared by others is high on our list. Also, while we’ve focused this initial release around the “business of healthcare”, in an upcoming phase we hope to include a complete disease index in this hashtag listing so as to help facilitate patient exploration as well.
This project is a work in progress … and literally always will be. It’s a controlled database, not a wiki, because we want to assure that every hashtag on the list has been vetted, has a level of critical mass, and that its relationships are well thought out. However, at the same time this is a “social project”, one in which we’re soliciting your input for the betterment of all.
So come step into the first official “HealthcareHashtags Project” … take it for a spin, let us know what you think, and help us to build a more well connected healthcare community.
February 23 2011 update
End the Carpet Bombing of Twitter!
What’s the #Matter?
Twitter’s elegance and simplicity have changed the world. Unfortunately the overuse of hashtags is polluting Twitter.
What’s the #Fix?
Think before you tweet. If you must use hashtags, limit yourself to two per tweet. Consider what your Twitter stream looks like to your followers.
2hashtags is a pledge to keep Twitter a clean well-lighted place and as free of noise as possible by using no more than two hashtags per tweet.
About
This blog presents a sampling of health and medical news and resources for all. Selected articles and resources will hopefully be of general interest but will also encourage further reading through posted references and other links. Currently I am focusing on public health, basic and applied research and very broadly on disease and healthy lifestyle topics.
Several times a month I will post items on international and global health issues. My Peace Corps Liberia experience (1980-81) has formed me as a global citizen in many ways and has challenged me to think of health and other topics in a more holistic manner.
Do you have an informational question in the health/medical area?
Email me at jmflahiff@yahoo.com
I will reply within 48 hours.
This blog is a companion site to my Health and Medical News and Resources Web site with…
- Great places to start (locating health information)
- Links to help from others (as health care providers and support groups)
- Interactive tools (as health calculators and apps)
- Select related news sites and blogs
My professional work experience and education includes over 15 years experience as a medical librarian and a Master’s in Library Science. In my most recent position I enjoyed contributing to our library’s blog, performing in depth literature searches, and collaborating with faculty, staff, students, and the general public.
While I will never be be able to keep up with the universe of current health/medical news, I subscribe to the following to glean entries for this blog.
- Science Daily – Your source for the latest research news
- MedlinePlus email updates from the US National Institutes of Health
- Partners in Information Access for the Public Health Workforce – a collaboration of U.S. government agencies, public health organizations and health sciences libraries
- US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) news now with updates on the agency’s efforts to “improve the quality, safety, efficiency, and effectiveness of health care for all Americans”
- Research Buzz, “news about search engines, digital archives, online museums, databases, and other Internet information collections since 1998”
- Scout Report, a “weekly publication offering a selection of new and newly discovered Internet resources of interest to researchers and educators”
- KevinMD.com -“Social Media’s leading physician voice”
- EurekAlert-Medicine and Health
Health and Medical News and Resources 