Our lives are inundated with
social media - statuses, tweets, connections, pins and the list goes on. In
previous modules we looked at how to mine that data to make predictions for
every industry - from healthcare to retail. This last module switched the
perspective to look at the relationships between all of that data. Social
networks line up well with graph theory where the entities are vertices and the
relationships between them are edges. This could be the relationship between
people on Facebook or LinkedIn, connections between shares on Facebook, pins on
Pinterest or influencers on Salesforce. Or the cross-pollination between
multiple networks like Instagram photos being posted on Facebook. All of this
gives us insight into real time trends, relationships between people, causes
and ideas dissemination and growth. What appeals to me most is how networks
give us meaningful ways to understand and model large and complex systems and
it's all based on math. It's accessible and compelling but it's not guess work
- there's meaningful analysis behind it. This module focused on types of
networks, vertices, and edges and how to understand them based on network
properties such as the structure, centrality measures, density, clustering
coefficients, cliques and others.
It's no surprise - the first
thing I did with this module was look for examples of network analysis
impacting or being used in healthcare. I found an example of ER doctors being
able to prep better for the victims after the Boston Marathon Bombing than if
they'd had to rely on a traditional news report (Neuhauser) and how Mayo Clinic
is jumping into social media with both feet, so to speak, to drive innovation
(Pennic). Is any of this data being combined together to look at healthcare from
a viewpoint of perspective? I found the Institute for Health Metrics and
Evaluation (IHME) which had some great data visualizations: http://www.healthdata.org/results/data-visualizations.
Still, we're not looking at relationships between entities. I can find
countless explanations of how social media is a disruptive influence in
healthcare and is going to bring big changes (Cerrato, Honigman) but there is
no one network which embodies healthcare. There's no Twitter of healthcare -
instead we have FollowMyHealth, MedSeek, HealthVault and countless others. Then
if we factor in the fitness devices and the apps that come with them and
there's endless sources of disparate data. This speaks to a fundamental flaw in
healthcare - the lack of standardization means it's difficult to impossible to
leverage the data to find trends and use to make decisions.
I did, after some digging, find
the Healthcare Hashtag Project ("Why the Healthcare Hashtag Project?")
which seeks to use Twitter hashtags to
"Discover where the
healthcare conversations are taking place
Discover who to follow within
your specialty or disease
Discover what healthcare topics
are trending in real-time."
I love this idea! Physicians, labs, and
research organizations can access that data and use it. The next step in the
evolution needs to be a tool that can be easily used by the interested parties
like the IHME.
Citations
Cerrato, Paul. "Will Social
Media Revolutionize Healthcare?" InformationWeek.com. 19 Sept. 2014. Web.
10 Mar. 2015.
Honigman, Brian. "24
Outstanding Statistics & Figures on How Social Media has Impacted the
Health Care Industry." Referral MD. Sept. 2013. Web. 11 Mar. 2015.
Neuhauser, Alan. "Health
Care Harnesses Social Media." USNews.com. 5 Jun. 2014. Web. 10 Mar. 2015.
Pennic, Jasmine. "5 Reasons
Why Mayo Clinic Dominates Social Media in Healthcare." HITConsultant.net.
17 Feb. 2014. Web. 11 Mar. 2015
"Why the Healthcare Hashtag
Project?” Symplur.com. Web. 10 Mar. 2015.
