
Dr. Hasan Shanawani was overcome by frustration. So, last week he picked up his cellphone and began sharing on Twitter his family’s enraging experiences with the U.S. health care system
Quick ReadDr. Hasan Shanawani was overcome by frustration. So, last week he picked up his cellphone and began sharing on Twitter his family’s enraging experiences with the U.S. health care system
Dr. Hasan Shanawani was overcome by frustration. So, last week he picked up his cellphone and began sharing on Twitter his family’s enraging experiences with the U.S. health care system
It was an act of defiance — and desperation. Like millions of people who are sick or old and the families who care for them, this physician was disheartened by the health care system’s complexity and its all-too-frequent absence of caring and compassion.
Shanawani, a high-ranking physician at the Department of Veterans Affairs, had learned the day before that his 83-year-old father, also a physician, was hospitalized in New Jersey with a spinal fracture. But instead of being admitted as an inpatient, his dad was classified as an “observation care” patient — an outpatient status that Shanawani knew could have unfavorable consequences, both medically and financially.
On the phone with a hospital care coordinator, Shanawani pressed for an explanation. Why was his dad, who had metastatic stage 4 prostate cancer and an unstable spine, not considered eligible for a hospital admission? Why had an emergency room doctor told the family the night before that his father met admission criteria?
…continue reading ‘NAVIGATING AGING Even Doctors Can’t Navigate Our ‘Broken Health Care System’’
thumb image via KHN – Caitlin Hilyar/KHN illustration/Getty Images
The Latest Instagram Influencer Frontier? Medical PromotionsFebruary 15, 2019 |
Big pharma is partnering with influencers to sell new drugs and medical devices
Big pharma is partnering with influencers to sell new drugs and medical devices
Louise Roe has denim that’s ripped in all the right places, a bikini-ready body year-round, a husband and baby who look like they were picked from a catalog, and 698,000 Instagram followers. She also has the skin condition psoriasis, a chronic autoimmune disease defined by flaky, inflamed red or white patches of skin, and she wants you to know all about it.
Actually, she needs to tell you about her psoriasis on Instagram; otherwise, her paid partnership with Celgene, a biotechnology company that produces the patent-protected psoriasis medication Otezla, would presumably be canceled.
In recent years, businesses have adapted their advertising strategies to the rise in social media use, specifically on Instagram. The app is one of the most popular social networks, surpassed only by its parent company, Facebook, and is projected to have more than 111 million users in 2019 — more than half of whom are between ages 18 and 29. The high level of Instagram user engagement gives companies an opportunity to capitalize on users with thousands of followers, aptly dubbed “influencers,” through paid advertising partnerships.
…continue reading ‘The Latest Instagram Influencer Frontier? Medical Promotions’
Image: By Willedit4food – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75651269
People Can Predict Your TweetsJanuary 22, 2019 |
Even if you aren’t on Twitter. Companies have made billions of dollars by turning everything we say, do, and look at online into an experiment in consumer profiling. Recently, some users have had enough, curtailing their use of social media or deleting their accounts completely. But that’s no guarantee of privacy
Even if you aren’t on Twitter. Companies have made billions of dollars by turning everything we say, do, and look at online into an experiment in consumer profiling. Recently, some users have had enough, curtailing their use of social media or deleting their accounts completely. But that’s no guarantee of privacy
Companies have made billions of dollars by turning everything we say, do, and look at online into an experiment in consumer profiling. Recently, some users have had enough, curtailing their use of social media or deleting their accounts completely. But that’s no guarantee of privacy, according to a new study. If you can be linked to other users, their activity can expose you, too. Now, computer scientists have shown that the Twitter streams of your 10 closest contacts can predict your future tweets even better than your own stream.
“It’s much easier than it looks,” to figure out a person’s character from such second-hand surveillance, says David Garcia, a computational social scientist at the Medical University of Vienna in Austria who was not involved in the study.
Instead of predicting anyone’s actual tweets, researchers at the University of Vermont in Burlington estimated how predictable a person’s future words would be, using a measurement known as entropy. More entropy means more randomness and less repetition. They looked at the Twitter streams of 927 users, each of whom had 50 to 500 followers, as well as the 15 users each of them had tweeted at the most. In each individual’s stream, they calculated how much entropy the sequence of words contained. (On average, tweeters had more entropy than Ernest Hemingway, less than James Joyce.) They then plugged that number into a tool from information theory called Fano’s inequality to calculate how well a person’s stream could predict the first word in his or her next tweet. That upper bound on accuracy was, on average, 53%. But predicting each successive word is somewhat less accurate.
…continue reading ‘People Can Predict Your Tweets’
Participants in medical research are more empowered than ever to influence the design and outcomes of experiments. Now, researchers are trying to keep up
Participants in medical research are more empowered than ever to influence the design and outcomes of experiments. Now, researchers are trying to keep up
Amber Sapp was browsing the Internet late one night in August when she happened to find out that her 12-year-old son’s clinical trial had failed.
Every four weeks for two-and-a-half years, she had shuttled Garrett to a hospital nearly six hours away. There, he was prodded and pricked with needles in the hope that the antibody treatment being tested would reverse a devastating genetic disease called Duchenne muscular dystrophy. But an early data analysis, Sapp learnt, had shown that the treatment wasn’t working.
The thought of wasting Garrett’s limited time with a failed trial was hard enough. The news was all the more disturbing because it didn’t come from the trial organizers, but through a Facebook post from another parent. “It was upsetting that we found out that way,” says Amber. “It sent everybody on Facebook into a tizzy.” Even Garrett’s local clinical-trial coordinator, someone who should have had intimate knowledge of what was happening with the research, hadn’t yet heard the news.
…continue reading ‘How Facebook and Twitter Could Be The Next Disruptive Force in Clinical Trials’
Thumbimage via Nature – Abigail Bobo
Findings suggest much of the online discussion about vaccines may be linked to ‘malicious actors’ with ‘hidden agendas’
Findings suggest much of the online discussion about vaccines may be linked to ‘malicious actors’ with ‘hidden agendas’
Social media bots and Russian trolls sowed discord and spread false information about vaccines on Twitter, according to a new study conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University and other institutions.
Using tactics similar to those at work during the 2016 United States presidential election, these Twitter accounts entered into vaccine debates months before election season was under way. The study, “Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate,” was published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health.
The research team included Mark Dredze, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins and a pioneer in the collection and study of social media data to monitor flu cases, mental illness trends, and other health concerns. Hopkins computer science graduate students Tao Chen and Adrian Benton, as well as researchers from George Washington University and the University of Maryland, also contributed to the study. …
Image via Flickr Some rights reserved by Alan O’Rourke
Social Media, Privacy, and Research: A Muddled LandscapeJuly 10, 2018 |
The advent of social media technology has opened many new avenues of research in population health, demographics, psychology, and the social sciences
The advent of social media technology has opened many new avenues of research in population health, demographics, psychology, and the social sciences
It is crucial to consider whether researchers conducting observational research using social media need to obtain consent from their research subjects, and whether the current research regulations in the United States establish effective, ethical procedures for obtaining consent for such studies. To determine how to regulate research conducted using social media and the Internet, we must consider whether social media and other digital spaces are public or private domains.
The U.S. Supreme Court has traditionally supported a distinction between public domains, in which information is visible to virtually anyone, and private domains, in which one has “a reasonable expectation of privacy,” i.e., one would not think one’s activities could be observed or reported. Whether or not the expectation of privacy is reasonable is very subjective: the courts have never specified who defines reasonability, and what is considered reasonable depends on the public’s evolving attitudes toward privacy. While many are aware that advertisers and social media platforms can gain access to some elements of our data, millions of Facebook users were surprised to learn that Cambridge Analytica, a political research firm, had accessed user data on behalf of the Trump campaign. What might once have been considered a reasonable expectation of privacy could not be considered so in the future as public knowledge of the policies and practices of social media providers and users has changed. At the same time, it is widely acknowledged that once someone shares information on social media without restricting access to that information, the person no longer controls how it is used or who sees and, therefore, does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
…continue reading ‘Social Media, Privacy, and Research: A Muddled Landscape’
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Is That Your Doctor Swearing, Drinking on Facebook?April 18, 2017 |
Investigators find many examples of unprofessional, ‘potentially objectionable’ behavior online. The study is not the first to bring attention to doctors’ social media use. The issue has been on the medical profession’s radar for a while, said Dr. Matthew DeCamp, of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics in Baltimore
Investigators find many examples of unprofessional, ‘potentially objectionable’ behavior online. The study is not the first to bring attention to doctors’ social media use. The issue has been on the medical profession’s radar for a while, said Dr. Matthew DeCamp, of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics in Baltimore
…
Several professional societies, and some university medical centers, already have guidelines that call on doctors to use social media with care.
The American Medical Association, for instance, issued guidelines in 2010. They encourage doctors to “consider separating personal and professional content online.” They also stress the importance of “appropriate professional boundaries” with patients, and never violating patients’ privacy.
But it’s not clear how often those messages get through to doctors, said DeCamp, who was not involved in the study.
“It’s concerning that professional guidelines may not be having the intended effect,” he said.
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How to Stop a Norovirus OutbreakDecember 14, 2016 |
Tweet when you vomit. The UK Food Standards Agency has enlisted Twitter to track the spread of the norovirus, based on people tweeting about being ill
Tweet when you vomit. The UK Food Standards Agency has enlisted Twitter to track the spread of the norovirus, based on people tweeting about being ill
The cliche of social media is that it is full of people talking about their lunch. But this is one that the Food Standards Agency is now actively trying to encourage, at least if your lunch is heading the wrong way. Vomiting? Nauseated? Diarrhoea? Tweet it and you know at least one person will be reading – someone on the FSA’s norovirus monitoring team.
Since 2013, the agency has been developing an online epidemiology toolkit. It tried to work with Google initially, but found social media a far faster means of correlating lab results with geotagged incidences of people moaning about being “sick” (or a range of related search terms). To sharpen its results, the FSA excluded all simultaneous references to pregnancy, alcohol and anxiety, which have their own vomit-inducements.
This has greatly improved the lag time in its systems. Lab results take two days arrive, while tweets are instant. The FSA believes that the new system can predict an increase in norovirus in the following week between 70% and 80% of the time.
Image: By Graham Beards at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5736176