Twitter Can Help Predict Emergency Hospital Visits
NEW YORK: Twitter can help several hospitals plan better in terms of tackling patient rush and availability of resources and staff, suggests a study.
The researchers said personal health-related tweets posted by some users could be helpful for hospitals.
"You can get a lot of interesting insights from social media that you can't from electronic health records," said lead author professor Sudha Ram from the University of Arizona.
"You only go to the doctor once in a while, and you don't always tell your doctor how much you've been exercising or what you've been eating."
"But people share that information all the time on social media. We think that prediction models like this can be very useful, if we can combine various types of data, to address chronic diseases," she explained.
The researchers looked specifically at the chronic condition of asthma and how asthma-related tweets, analyzed alongside other data, can help predict asthma-related emergency room visits.
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