Analysing social networking for Public Health measures

It is well known that the Internet can be useful in monitoring disease outbreaks as different approaches have shown in recent studies, for instance based on the use of search engines (e.g. Google Trends) and Web 2.0 channels such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter.

I would like to focus on the use of Twitter in this fashion. Recently, Paul MJ et al. have published a paper ("You are What You Tweet: Analyzing Twitter for Public Health") where the messages of social media users are analysed in order to find out information to be useful for Public Health. The idea is to aggregate millions of messages to generate relevant knowledge, in that case, trying to get diverse public health measures, taking into account that Twitter (and social networks in general) may be a new Internet-surveillance method characterized by an important message volume, frequency and public availability. One of the problems I see is the fact that these messages and people behind them may represent a certain reality that could not be applied to the majority of cases or scenarios in terms of Public Health (probably many unknown factors play role in this environment). Nevertheless, I'm sure it's a very interesting line of research that needs to be more studied in depth.

Beyond e-patients

New Communication and Information Technologies (ICT) are no longer new, they are totally integrated into our lives, in our personal, social or professional relations, there is no turning back. For that reason, some terms which have made complete sense up to now are not necessary any more and should be given up.

E-patients and e-physicians turn back into patients and physicians, at present they have integrated twitter and facebook or other social networks into their day to day work, and they are using Google searches, as much as to be better informed in the case of the former and better trained in the latter and also clarify their doubts, their illness or concerns, to get support from others like them, sharing their knowledge and experience, to make an appointment, to get medical advice online and so forth.

Now the previous patient-doctor relationship in the current e-scenario is a simple reality and fortunately it is a renewed relationship and it isn't an "e-" any more. The Electronic Health Record (EHR) is shared between patients and medical doctors and the possibility to gain access to them is a fact, to recommend high quality websites is usual and it seems that online support groups and social networks will soon be incorporated in the EHR.

From now on, we may and we have to give up talking about "e"-patients, we reinvent o.s. time and again but now as "patients".