August 25, 2009
Twitter and Healthcare
How potentially useful is Twitter for medical applications? According to the Medical Connectivity section of the latest issue of Telemedicine and e-Health, Twitter is emerging as a potentially valuable means of real-time, on-the-go communication of healthcare information and medical alerts.
Physician groups, hospitals, and healthcare organizations are discovering a range of beneficial applications for using Twitter to communicate timely information both within the medical community and to patients and the public. Short messages, or "tweets," delivered through Twitter go out from a sender to a group of recipients simultaneously, providing a fast and easy way to reach a lot of people in a short time. This has obvious advantages for sharing time-critical information such as disaster alerts and drug safety warnings, tracking disease outbreaks, or disseminating healthcare information. Twitter applications are available to help patients find out about clinical trials, for example, or to link brief news alerts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to reliable websites that provide more detailed information.
Some of the many possible healthcare applications for Twitter include:
Disaster alerting and response
Diabetes management (blood glucose tracking)
Drug safety alerts from the Food and Drug Administration
Biomedical device data capture and reporting
Diagnostic brainstorming
Rare diseases tracking and resource connection
Providing smoking cessation assistance
Post-discharge patient consultations and follow-up care
The article describes ways in which individual physicians, hospitals, clinical trial organizations and the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention use Twitter. The CDC points out that 'because of the nonstop streaming quality of Twitter feeds and the sheer volume of traffic, Twitter more closely resembles radio, where the consumer turns it on, checks what’s going on, looks through traffic and content for that particular moment in time, but doesn’t backtrack through the archives. For the CDC it will be one of many channels to communicate information.
About Twitter
According to the article, "the key to Twitter is called microblogging, which has some relationship to text messaging (texting). Where texting is a way to communicate via cellular phone by sending text messages that are 160 characters or less and are read on a mobile device, Twitter takes those concepts a step further. Once someone has a Twitter account, they can enter messages 140 characters or less, which are then sent out to anyone else on Twitter who is following that account. Vice versa, after signing up, you can search for people of interest and follow what they have to say at any given moment. It can be read on the individual homepage on Twitter or have the messages pushed to or from a mobile device."
While it is unclear how many people are actually using Twitter, the numbers are estimated to range from 4 to 5 million users to 6 million monthly visitors, with monthly visits reaching 55 million. It appears to have a 60% dropout rate as well.
Twittering Healthcare:Social Media and Medicine
Telemedicine and e-Health
Nielsen Information on Twitter
Posted by rsk at August 25, 2009 09:13 AM