Popular social media sites have millions of registered users (Facebook, over 800 million; Twitter, over 500 million; WordPress, over 15 million), many of whom log in daily to share intimate details of their lives, including symptoms, illnesses and struggles with chronic diseases. This is a treasure trove of informal data available for research and monitoring of public health issues. While tapping this resource raises many ethical issues, particularly individual identification, initial research has demonstrated that it may help with disease surveillance.

St Louis and Zorlu offer the following examples:

• Recent analysis of three million tweets from May – December 2009 showed that “the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak could have been identified on Twitter one week before it emerged in official records from general practitioner reports”
• Physicians, unable to reach patients with chronic conditions after the tsunami in Japan in March 2011, turned to Twitter and the mobile Internet to direct patients to sources for their medications.
• Digital surveillance platforms such as BioCaster and HealthMap regularly search and extract information from news, social media and other sites looking for hints and clues of new public health threats.

While these examples are compelling, and collaborations between HealthMap and public health agencies are underway to track influenza and other public health challenges, Twitter cannot replace traditional methods of tracking and verifying diseases. How many times have you or someone you know attributed symptoms to one illness, only to find it was a different illness? Monitoring must be coupled with verification, else we risk spreading rumor and panic.

Do you use Twitter or other social media to talk about your health concerns and conditions? How do you feel about having this information monitored for the good of many? Tell us!

References:

St Louis, C., & Zorlu, G. (2012). Can Twitter predict disease outbreaks? BMJ, 344, e2353. doi: 10.1136/bmj.e2353

Szomszor, M., Kostkova, P., & De Quincey, E. (2012). Swineflu: Twitter predicts swine flu oubreak in 2009.

Tamura, Y., & Fukuda, K. (2011). Earthquake in Japan. Lancet, 377(9778), 1652. doi: 10.1016/s0140-6736(11)60672-7

Can’t stay current with important information about your field?

Do you wish there was an easier way to keep on top of what’s happening?

Join us for ‘Keeping Current with Social Media’ on April 6th at 2pm in HSEB 3100B. Amy Honisett and Peter Jones from the Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library will show you the basics of two great tools (RSS Feeds and Twitter) you can use to streamline your information overload. They will also briefly cover dashboards, which are services that collect your many social media accounts into one place.

Register online at: http://bit.ly/HpAfwi 

[Chisolm] “is one of a growing number of medical professionals who, despite the present-day climate of strict patient privacy regulations and oversight, see the benefits of using social media to supplement their work and interact with colleagues, patients and the general public.” She connects with others using her Twitter accounts @whole_patients in order to “demystify psychiatry and psychotherapy for patients and doctors,” and @psychpearls , “which is targeted to learners interested in ‘clinical pearls’ about psychiatry.”

She and a colleague, Tabor Flickinger, a clinical education fellow, are designing a curriculum to train students at the School of Medicine in the use, benefits and potential pitfalls of using social media in medicine. In December 2011 they received an Osler Center for Clinical Excellence small grant award to run a pilot study with medical students during their third year clerkship of 2012 – 2013.

The format of the pilot study will be a voluntary online addition to clinical activities during the eight-week Internal Medicine Clerkship. One group of students will participate in a blog where they can write about and discuss their clinical experiences. Another group will serve as a comparison cohort; they will be studied but will not participate in the blog (from the Hopkins Gazette article).

No doubt many forward-thinking medical institutions, such as the University of Utah, will be watching for the results of this study.

Are you using social media in your practice (medical, psychiatry, or whatever)? How helpful has it been? What have proven to be the pitfalls? Tell us about it!

Amidst this glut of options, it is easy to get hung up on the technology itself. Keep in mind that you don’t have to try everything at once. First, sit down and decide what your information needs are. If you need:

• In-depth discussions on certain research topics, look at blogs and wikis
• Real-time sampling of what people are thinking and saying on a given topic, try Twitter.
• Inspiration from people thinking out-of-the-box, look at the Facebook pages of enthusiastic upstarts in your field.
• To track new research, use RSS feeds and Google Reader
• Help clarifying your information needs before you can hope to begin utilizing these tools, ask a librarian!

Eccles Library staff have been on the cutting edge of information tools for many years, and both new and seasoned librarians can help you clarify which ones best meet your needs, and get you started using them. Just ask!

What social media tools do you use in your research? Tell us about it!

The Krafty Librarian recently asked some thoughtful questions about the value of social media to medical and academic librarians:

• Since it is apparent that social media is being used and it is here to stay for a while, what are the biggest issues you face personally and professionally?
• Do you worry about a lack of privacy?  As more and more companies are going on Facebook and Twitter what is your thought about following them?  Do you follow them? Why or why not?
• What is your library or institution doing on Twitter, Facebook or Foursquare? How is your library or institution engaging its users? How do you measure engagement?
• Does the increase of bots on Twitter and inactive Facebook followers concern you?

The Eccles Library is trying to engage its users via its Twitter feed, Facebook page and this blog. One hot topic among medical academic libraries is health literacy, which Wikipedia defines as “an individual’s ability to read, understand and use healthcare information to make decisions and follow instructions for treatment.” Twitter searches using “#healthliteracy” has proven to be informative in learning what that site’s users are reading and thinking about this topic, as noted in a previous post. And as I posted more tweets on this topic, our feed has gained a few more followers.

On our Facebook page, the topic that appears to have garnered the most comments and Likes was copyright issues. But measuring engagement has proven elusive. Having worked in business previously, the value of time spent on a particular project was described as a return on investment or ROI. The book Social Media ROI by Olivier Blanchard just arrived on my desk via Interlibrary Loan, and may offer some insights on how to apply this concept to libraries and their use of social media. Stay tuned…

Here are a few examples of what’s being discussed (tweeted about) on health literacy (#healthliteracy) on Twitter:

• The non-profit organization Health Literacy Missouri (@HealthLitMO) just published a paper titled “Health Literacy Essential to Successful Implementation of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs)” bySusan Kendig, JD, MSN and Arthur Culbert, PhD. The paper points out that our current health system’s incentives for health care organizations “rewards volume and intensity of services, resulting in fragmentation and higher costs with little attention to value.” It goes on to document how health literacy is directly related to health outcomes.
• @apdolan has sought the thoughts and input of others on how the new Google+ might be used for health activism for an upcoming blog posting.
• @alixefloyd cheered and linked to an article in the NY Times about how more medical schools are screening their applicants for people skills.
• @ACUnderserved publicized information about a “Health Literacy Innovators Award Contest” sponsored by Health Literacy Innovations, a privately held company that “creates tools to help eliminate medical mistakes and confusion due to low health literacy.”

At first, even this author was skeptical of Twitter. But when one can sample what is of current interest on any given topic instantly, it becomes clear the value this platform has.

What topics do you follow on Twitter? If you have used it for research or to take the pulse of people on a particular subject, how helpful have you found it to be? Tell us!

Social media is an inexpensive and flexible way to market and promote library services, engage with users, and provide new ways to utilize library content and discovery tools. Dryer recommends that if a library utilizes social media, they need policies in order to:

• Provide guidelines to employees and patrons.
• Teach employees about the benefits and dangers of social media.
• Minimize legal risks to the library and its employees.

Dryer’s talk provided much useful information on best practices for dealing with user/patron-posted content, issues and concerns related to children and social media, and free speech issues.

Generally speaking, if a library site (website, social media, etc.) allows for patron posting of content, it is considered a “limited public forum.” Content on such a forum is best managed by adopting a policy that meets First Amendment considerations; clearly defines the purpose of the forum; and reserves the right to remove content unrelated to that purpose.

As readers of this blog know, Eccles Health Sciences Library has a Facebook page, Twitter feed, and this blog. At the present, only library faculty and staff are allowed to post to these accounts, and we have developed internal policies to guide their use. If you represent a library and would like to read our policy, please email me at