Social Media Data as a Public Data Resource Capable of Impacting Healthcare @ UofA Big Data in Healthcare Symposium

Social Media Data as a Public Data Resource
Capable of Impacting Healthcare
© 2014 Social Health Insights LLC
Brian Norris MBA, RN-BC, FHIMSS
@Geek_Nurse
Mark Silverberg, MS-MIS
@Skram

NowTrending.HHS.gov
• Built in response to the 2012 HHS/ASPR
NowTrending Challenge
• Utilizes the Twitter streaming API to look at
disease & disaster related conversations
• Won challenge
• Continued research into how Twitter data could
help inform disease and disaster surveillance
• Exploring concepts that could be applied broader
than just Twitter

Why Twitter?
• Estimated 500 Million Users Worldwide
• ~ 500 Million tweets per day (October 2012)
• = ~25 tweets for every human on the planet
• If Twitter were a country it would be larger
than the United States by 184 Million people
• Would be the 3rd largest country in the world
(behind China and India)

72% of adults are social site users
SOURCE: http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/social-networking-sites.aspx

Social Data Emerging in The Fight
Against Disease

One day on Twitter
319,079 Tweets collected from Twitter on 02/05/2013 that match terms tracked on MappyHealth.com

Early questions
 What problem do we want to solve?
 How will users of the platform use the information
provided?
 What sources will be utilized to contribute towards the
insight sought?
 How does one visualize the data?
 What semantics will be meaningful and useful?
 What analytical intervals are pertinent?
 Do we need geo-located data or more generalized?
 How do we work around non-geo-located data points?

Lots of ways to answer these questions

Overview of Our Technical Solution
Tweets
Receive a
Tweets by
keyword
Twitter
API Streaming
filter endpoint
Simple NLP
& Ingestion
Daemon constantly
receiving,
classifying, and
inserting Tweets into
document-based
database
Number
Crunching
& Analytics
Map/Reduce jobs on
various intervals with
some ad-hoc queries
Visualizatio
n and
Exports
POST https://stream.twitter.com/1.1
/statuses/filter.json

Complimenting Traditional Data is a
Start but there is so Much More!

“Social Media Has Accelerated the Telephone
Game Exponentially”

Influenza Vaccination
Data captured using the Twitter streaming API - https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-apis. Visual created by Social Health Insights LLC

Monitoring How We Communicate

Pushing Information Out

H7N9
'Two new bird flu
cases' in China: Two
new cases of H7N9
"bird flu" are reported
by China's official
state new...
http://t.co/hxlpL3narl

“死亡” & “death” H7N9 Tweets

Before “Official” Announcement
@WHO: So far, WHO is aware of 14 confirmed #H7N9 cases, with 6 deaths. Awaiting
confirmation of 2 more cases. #influenza #flu
WHO tweet
Pre confirmation
twitter chatter
Chinese social reports of 14
cases, 6 deaths H7N9

Where Are They Tweeting?
Data captured using the Twitter streaming API - https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-apis. Visual created by Social Health Insights LLC. Represents H7N9 tweets captured.

Is every tweet equally important?
Total Estimated Impressions = Max Followers (during collected timeframe) * Number of Tweets. For Timeframe from 03/31/2013 6 am to 4/8/2013
12 pm GMT … Total Estimated Impressions = 1,996,125,456
Data captured using the Twitter streaming API - https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-apis. Visual created by Social Health Insights LLC – H7N9 Tweets Captured

@WHO: #H7N9 in China: These are the first-ever cases of H7N9 infection in humans. No
indication so far of human-to-human transmission
Follow That Tweet
Buenos Aires, Santiago,
US, London, Beijing, Hong
Kong, Cairo
Beijing, Quito, Perth,
Canberra, Sydney
Global

Ebola in the US
500% increase

Heatmapping Ebola
Conversations

Same for Disasters:
Example Earthquake Activity
Mexico
Earthquake
Nepal
Earthquake

Constant Challenges
Cough, Running Nose and
Fever. Can you go away ?
:(
Vs.
I have a Bieber Fever ♥
1 - 3% Geo-Tagged Vs. 97 – 99% Non Geo-Tagged
Washington, DC Vs. I am on Earth!
• Access limitations to full data streams (rate limits, term limits, connectivity
• Linguistics and slang
• Character limitation for message

Location-driven listening: knowing where and
what people are talking about

Other Emerging
Digital Disease Innovations

Opportunities

“Now Trending has provided us a quick and easy
to understand look at how social media
conversations around illnesses trend. This has
been especially helpful during recent illness
outbreaks for providing a more complete
situational awareness analysis.”
- Health and Human Services, Assistant Secretary for
Preparedness Response (HHS/ASPR)

Using Other Open & Public Data
Using Google Glass to interface with information systems and
APIs to bring information and insights to users where and when
they need or want them. AskOpenData.com & DawnData.com
Eldercare.gov has a website and
hotline staffed 9-5 but we built a
SMS/phone automated attendant
that anyone can use anytime

Thank you
Brian Norris MBA, RN-BC, FHIMSS
@Geek_Nurse
Mark Silverberg, MS-MIS
@Skram

Social Media Data as a Public Data Resource Capable of Impacting Healthcare @ UofA Big Data in Healthcare Symposium

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