Health Care Professionals Turning to Twitter for Sharing Health Research
Health Care Professionals Turning to Twitter for Sharing Health Research – A new study shows that more and more physicians are resorting to Twitter to share news about the latest research and also to see what health care information users are consuming. Researchers say Twitter can help physicians to be better prepared to deal with questions from patients.
The study was conducted by researchers at University of British Columbia, and the results were presented at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Lead author Julie Robillard and a physchology student, Emanuel Cabral, monitored conversations on Twitter around stem cell research spinal cord injury and Parkinson’s disease. They found that 25% of tweets about spinal cord injury and 15 per cent of the tweets about Parkinson’s disease were from health care professionals. They also found that the majority of the tweets were about medical breakthroughs and provided links to relevant research reports.
Interestingly, researchers also found that less than 5% of users spoke out against stem-cell research.
According to Robillard social media conversation on health care can temper expectations on the part of users about various treatments and help doctors to be more aware of what information users are consuming and help them be better prepared to handle their questions.
Category: News
