gms | German Medical Science

20. Deutscher Kongress für Versorgungsforschung

Deutsches Netzwerk Versorgungsforschung e. V.

06. - 08.10.2021, digital

Social media mining: identifying unmet medical needs in online patient communities

Meeting Abstract

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  • Jonathan Koß - Universität Witten/Herdecke, Witten, Deutschland
  • Sabine Bohnet-Joschko - Universität Witten/Herdecke, Witten, Deutschland

20. Deutscher Kongress für Versorgungsforschung (DKVF). sine loco [digital], 06.-08.10.2021. Düsseldorf: German Medical Science GMS Publishing House; 2021. Doc21dkvf174

doi: 10.3205/21dkvf174, urn:nbn:de:0183-21dkvf1747

Published: September 27, 2021

© 2021 Koß et al.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. See license information at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.


Outline

Text

Strengthening the patient perspective is a crucial success factor in addressing patients unmet medical needs and to improve healthcare but simultaneously remains difficult to assess and integrate. As patients communicate about their diseases in social media, content could be a valuable data source to guide product and service innovation, and thus deliver better-targeted therapies to unmet needs. At the same time, manual content analysis is almost impossible while artificial intelligence enables an automated and cost-efficient processing - also referred to as social media mining (SMM).

Objective: How can social media mining support patient-centered product and service innovations? We analyzed fundamental methods and applications.

Method: Scoping Review, based on PubMed, Scopus and EBSCO Business Source Complete.

Results: SMM can be used to process data from online patient communities to better understand patient perception, experience and unmet medical needs. It can assist in identifying patient-centered product and service innovation opportunities covering a broad range from drug discovery and development to post-market surveillance.

Discussion: Examples show that chronic diseases with a high level of suffering are particularly suitable for analysis, while acute illness that only causes minor distress will probably not result in sufficiently rich content expression on social media. While planning to use SMM, the age distribution of social media in the relevant patient target group should be considered as well as access to technology. Generations and groups that do not use social media can hardly be studied via social media mining. Similarly, populations in developing countries with limited access to certain social media platforms (e.g., due relatively limited internet access and low literacy rates) are also more difficult to investigate.

Practice implication: SMM can be a powerful tool to explore patient’s perspectives, but needs extensive adjustments, depending on the respective research question.

Appeal for practice (science and/or care) in one sentence: With the increase in social media data and patients sharing more information related to disease trajectories, research and potential of SMM will continue to grow and become a key enabler for patient-centered innovation.