America
Twitter can help predict emergency hospital visits
New York, April 16
Twitter can help several
hospitals plan better in terms of tackling patient rush and availability
of resources and staff, suggests a study.
The researchers said personal health-related tweets posted by some users could be helpful for hospitals.
"You
can get a lot of interesting insights from social media that you can't
from electronic health records," said lead author professor Sudha Ram
from the University of Arizona.
"You only go to the doctor once
in a while, and you don't always tell your doctor how much you've been
exercising or what you've been eating."
"But people share that
information all the time on social media. We think that prediction
models like this can be very useful, if we can combine various types of
data, to address chronic diseases," she explained.
The
researchers looked specifically at the chronic condition of asthma and
how asthma-related tweets, analysed alongside other data, can help
predict asthma-related emergency room visits.
Ram and colleagues
created a model that was able to successfully predict approximately how
many asthma sufferers would visit the emergency room at a large hospital
in Dallas on a given day, based on an analysis of data gleaned from
electronic medical records, air quality sensors and Twitter.
"We realised that asthma is one of the biggest traffic generators in the emergency department," Ram said.
"Often
what happens is that there are not the right people in the ED to treat
these patients, or not the right equipment, and that causes a lot of
unforeseen problems," she added.
The researchers found that as
certain air quality measures worsened, asthma visits to the emergency
room went up. Asthma visits also increased as the number of
asthma-related tweets went up.
The findings are scheduled to be published in the Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics.