Novel utilization of social media “listening” in public health

Background: Over a billion people utilize Twitter and other social media platforms every day. These produce millions of conversations about all kinds of topics everyday. In 2009 during the swine flu a look back has shown that “listening” into these conversations and then analyzing these trends could produce valuable insight. I co-developed a platform to listen into conversations about various diseases and natural disasters that won the HHS/ASPR NowTrending2012 contest in September 2012. This presentation will explain statistical findings of trends observed during the 2012-2013 flu season and explain several other examples of potential of use of social media listening in public health and healthcare. Objective/purpose: The objective of this presentation is to explain next generation use of non-traditional data sets such as that from Twitter in public health as a complement to traditional surveillance methods and data. Methods: Analyzed millions of tweets from May 2012 to current for various different diseases and natural disasters. We have further completed statistical analysis of these trends against publically reported data sets such as CDC ILI and WHO/NREVSS data sets during the 2012-2013 flu season. Additionally we analyzed the trends observed in various ways and will present examples of these findings against events that were publically reported. Results: We have found a high degree of correlation of Twitter trends to CDC ILI and WHO/NREVSS trends during the 2012-2013 flu seasons. I will explain these findings along with other examples of trends we have observed against publically reported events. Discussion/conclusions: This presentation will include a lot of visual representations of results including animations, graphs, statistical visuals and much more. I will also discuss the pro's and con's as well as the challenged of social listening throughout the presentation.