Social Media for Health and Safety

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Social media is transforming healthcare. Thirty-four percent of Americans turned to social media for healthin 2008, a number that is only growing.

One of the technologies that has been prominent is Twitter, a microblogging tool. It was the fourth most visited social media site after Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube for the week ending 6/27/09 [Hitwise] and attracted 44.5 million unique visitors worldwide in June, 2009 [comScore]. There have been some notable health applications of Twitter. Twitter has been used for “infodemiology” and “infoveillance” for heath concerns like H1N1 through monitoring status updates [Eysenbach, G (2009)].  Twitter has been used for smoking cessation by TobaccoFreeFlorida [http://lisagualtieri.com/2008/09/28/how-many-people-does-it-take-to-make-a-success-a-look-at-qwitter/]. And it has been used by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for peanut butter recall updates [http://health.usnews.com/blogs/on-parenting/2009/02/06/salmonella-peanut-butter-recalls-spread-on-twitter-facebook.html]. Some of the newsworthy uses of Twitter include the use of it by patients or surgeons during medical procedures [http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/17/twitter.surgery/index.html]. Did you hear about the patient who tweeted his vascectomy?

Healthcare organizations vary widely in if and how they use Twitter.  Many, like the Vermont Department of Health, have a relatively new presence. Other healthcare organizations seemingly start but do not sustain their use, use their Twitter page solely to direct people to their Facebook page or Web site, or stake out their organization’s name in Twitter so that no one else claims it but then don’t use the account. In such cases, the organization may arguably be better off without using Twitter at all since their use may harm their credibility. Weight Watchers has only 3 tweets, all dating from February 2009, yet they make excellent use of their Web site and Facebook page. Families for Depression Awareness a total of only 5 tweets but similarly has an active Web site and Facebook page.

NIOSH, the US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, is represented on Twitter by NIOSH safe and healthy and NIOSH Mining, the former with an impressive 726 tweets and 1,718 followers as of September 12, 2009. As such, NIOSH provides an excellent example of active and effective use of Twitter and does so with only one person actively tweeting, Mark Senk. NIOSH’s Twitter presence is successful because it is frequently updated (but not so often as to feel like spam), provides timely information on relevant safety and health issues and retweets enough to let followers know that their tweets are being read.

With 44.5 million people worldwide using Twitter, healthcare organizations should be using it, or considering how to use it, to reach people with health and safety messages. While a formal strategy complete with policies and guidelines may not be necessary, sustained commitment is. Three advantages of Twitter are the sheer numbers of people using it, the ease and immediacy of its use, and the ease of obtaining basic metrics such as the number of followers. However, it is much harder to measure the impact of a specific technology at helping people achieve better health or, in the case of NIOSH, safer working conditions.

If you aren’t using Twitter at all or want to learn from how others are using it, please read the seven steps for successful Twitter use, based on an interview with Mark Senk, at http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&article=91-1.

About the Author

Lisa Gualtieri

Lisa Gualtieri teaches Online Consumer Health and Web Strategies for Health Communication in the Health Communication Program at Tufts University School of Medicine and her research focuses on how healthcare consumers use the Internet for education and support and how they communicate with their healthcare providers about their Internet use. Write to her about your interests in eHealthcare and specifically about your use of social media for health at lisa@acm.org