I
am really amazed after reading this article that twitter can be this good use
of social network in healthcare. Twitter is just like blogging but more
specifically it is a micro-blogging that enables their users to send and reach
each other's short 140 character messages called tweets. What I find interesting
in this article is that twitter is used for monitoring actual disease activity
and public concern about health related events. By using twitter's new
streaming application programmer's interface (API), we can collect large amount
of tweets in order to monitor specific
disease related activity as they collected for influenza activity over the US. In addition, the use of monitoring public's
interest and concerns related to any disease like H1N1 influenza by twitter was faster than the current
practice.
The
data you would receive over twitter wouldn't be as suitable as you would
receive by visiting emergency departments at national level but twitter data can be very easily collected
and processed in real time. Moreover, it can be used for more than just
monitoring disease activity since it provides more relative information than
just search queries. For instance, in
this article, they had actually observed the perceptions of people taking influenza
vaccine in pregnancy where they saw that pregnant woman might avoid the new H1N1 vaccine
due to pregnancy-related concerns so this makes public health professional to be
aware of such concerns. In short, twitter can be a great tool for healthcare system if it is used wisely and effectively. In order to know how twitter can be used effectively for healthcare purposes, check out the following link:
http://philbaumann.com/2009/01/16/140-health-care-uses-for-twitter/
http://philbaumann.com/2009/01/16/140-health-care-uses-for-twitter/
The
article can be accessed through the following link:
In my experience this is my first time utilizing twitter, and I think that more people utilice twitter for personal use rather than social, but in fact, it's also thruth that many organizations, pharmacies, people, and others utilize twitter for health care issues like here for monitoring Influenza, and this trend it's going to increase with time.
ReplyDelete