Module 4 - Networks

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.