Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences | 2019 Exploring the Use of Twitter by Leading Medical Centers in the United States Nima Kordzadeh Worcester Polytechnic Institute
[email protected] Abstract Healthcare organizations such as hospitals and more than 50% (1713/3371) of the sampled hospitals clinics increasingly use social media platforms such had Twitter accounts. Some hospitals’ twitter channels as Twitter to raise awareness in the community about have a few hundred followers (e.g., Kapiolani Medical health and wellness issues. In line with this trend, the Center for Women & Children located in Honolulu, current study seeks to understand how Cleveland Hawaii), whereas other hospitals have hundreds of Clinic, Johns Hopkins Hospital, and Mayo Clinic use thousands of followers on Twitter (e.g., Cleveland their primary Twitter accounts to post information Clinic located in Cleveland, Ohio). related to each of the following major health topics: Healthcare organizations that use Twitter, or are brain, cancer, diabetes, diet, exercise, heart, mental planning to embrace this platform, need to first health, and obesity. Nearly 6,000 tweets posted by formulate a social media strategy, decide on what those medical centers were collected and analyzed. content to post on their channels, and learn how to The results showed that the three medical centers used effectively use Twitter, among other social media diet and cancer topics more frequently than the other environments, to promote health and wellness in the six topics in their tweets. Moreover, diabetes was community. To do so, those organizations can learn consistently the least frequently used topic in the from healthcare providers that have successfully analyzed tweets.