Quantifying the Twitter Influence of Third Party Commercial Entities versus Healthcare Providers in Thirteen Medical Conferences from 2011 – 2013

Abstract

IntroductionTwitter channels are increasingly popular at medical conferences. Many groups, including healthcare providers and third party entities (e.g., pharmaceutical or medical device companies) use these channels to communicate with one another. These channels are unregulated and can allow third party commercial entities to exert an equal or greater amount of Twitter influence than healthcare providers. Third parties can use this influence to promote their products or services instead of sharing unbiased, evidence-based information. In this investigation we quantified the Twitter influence that third party commercial entities had in 13 major medical conferences.MethodsWe analyzed tweets contained in the official Twitter hashtags of thirteen medical conferences from 2011 to 2013. We placed tweet authors into one of four categories based on their account profile: healthcare provider, third party commercial entity, none of the above and unknown. We measured Twitter activity by the number of tweet authors per category and the tweet-to-author ratio by category. We measured Twitter influence by the PageRank of tweet authors by category.ResultsWe analyzed 51159 tweets authored by 8778 Twitter account holders in 13 conferences that were sponsored by 5 medical societies. A quarter of all authors identified themselves as healthcare providers, while only 18% could be identified as third party commercial entities. Healthcare providers had a greater tweet-to-author ratio than their third party commercial entity counterparts (8.98 versus 6.93 tweets). Despite having less authors and composing less tweets, third party commercial entities had a statistically similar PageRank as healthcare providers (0.761 versus 0.797).ConclusionThe Twitter influence of third party commercial entities (PageRank) is similar to that of healthcare providers. This finding is interesting because the number of tweets and third party commercial entity authors required to achieve this PageRank is far fewer than that needed by healthcare providers. Without safety mechanisms in place, the Twitter channels of medical conferences can devolve into a venue for the spread of biased information rather than evidence-based medical knowledge that is expected at live conferences. Continuing to measure the Twitter influence that third parties exert can help conference organizers develop reasonable guidelines for Twitter channel activity.

Tweeting the Headache Meetings: Cross‐Sectional Analysis of Twitter Activity Surrounding American Headache Society Conferences

“…Public Twitter data were analyzed in aggregate without any direct interaction with the users and were presented without individual identifiers. By proposed guidelines for big data research, this study thereby maintained the “distance principle” and did not require local institutional review board oversight …”

“…4 Qualitative analysis could also shed further light on the degree of industry influence present in conference Twitter activity, which is a growing concern for keeping medical conferences objective and educational rather than slanted and promotional. 21 Additional future research could study which conference participants are most influential using more in-depth metrics such as PageRank, 21 which might allow conference organizers to reach out and engage these influencers directly to help accomplish conference goals. Future studies could also search for more robust approaches for following and analyzing ongoing Twitter conversations after a conference concludes: we saw that Tweets using the official conference hashtag drop off abruptly almost immediately after the conference concludes, but conference influence might continue in persistent clusters of interacting users, topics, and hashtags.…”

“…By proposed guidelines for big data research, this study thereby maintained the "distance principle" and did not require local institutional review board oversight. 20,21 For a 10-day period including and surrounding each conference, we gathered summative data including total number of tweets that used the conference hashtag, number of potential impressions generated by those tweets (actual impressions are not available in aggregate), number of accounts that made at least 1 tweet using the hashtag ("participants"), average number of tweets per hour, and average number of tweets per participant. For example, for the 2016 AHS Scientific Meeting we gathered data for the period from November 13, 2016 12:00 AM to November 23, 2016 12:00 AM, which included the 4 days before the conference, 4 days of conference, and 2 days after the conference.…”

Role of Health Technology Assessment in Pharmaceutical Market Access in Developed Countries

“…There have also been concerns with some of the marketing activities of pharmaceutical, especially if this leads to inappropriate prescribing which add to costs and/ or potential patient safety [3,[77][78][79][80][81][82][83]. This includes issues of 'evergreening' of medicines further adding to costs without necessarily improving patient care [84].…”

Responding to Unsolicited Medical Requests from Health Care Professionals on Pharmaceutical Industry-Owned Social Media Sites: Three Pilot Studies (Preprint)

“…Ample literature has been published looking at the role of Twitter at various conferences across specialties [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]. A tweet analysis of thirteen conferences from 2011-2013 identified 51,159 tweets by 8,778 Twitter account holders of which 25% were identified HCPs who composed 19,503 (38%)of the tweets [19].…”