Matthew's Blog
Twitter in Emergencies: Healthcare Can Learn from Hawaii’s False Missile Threat Alarm
There will be a lot healthcare systems can learn from Hawaii’s recent false alarm regarding an incoming missile. Much of this will center around the relationship between system complexity, human error, and system failure - subject which all doctors understand. Some...
The Golden Rule of Social Media for Healthcare
There are many rules for social media use within healthcare. Usually these will come down from upon high via an organizations HR department, with strict attention to obeying HIPPA rules, and with a focus on not embarrassing the organization. These will be rules on...
Why I am Learning Python
To understand a culture, you must first understand it’s language. Most Americans initially don’t like Paris, and the reason is most Americans don’t speak French. Learning the French language is the entry point to understanding the French culture, and - in the case of...
“Ewwwwww fat people disgust me!!!” – Why Doctors need to be on Social Media
Please read the excellent, but disturbing medical article Obesity in social media: a mixed methods analysis. You will quickly understand the need for physicians and other medical professionals to be more engaged on social media. In this study, which looked at the word...
The Brass Ring of Healthcare Social Media: Health
The three obvious business reasons for a healthcare organization to master social media are: 1.Branding 2.Physician Recruiting, 3. New Patient Development. Most healthcare organizations see social media as strictly a BRANDING tool. The gatekeepers for it will be ...
Think Mobile
In 2017, the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) looked at the performance of 297 government websites over 3 months and tracked 2.55 billion visits. 43.5% of these visits were done from a mobile device. It’s important that whenever we think about...
Obesity and Social Media – The Growing Body of Research
A natural extension of my being board certified in Obesity Medicine and having a deep interest in Social Media is bring curious as to where they intersect. Above is a graph showing the increasing number of PUBMED citations using both Social Media + Obesity as search...
Comparing Twitter Feeds: Healthcare vs Celebrities
Sometimes there is value to comparing apples to oranges. In this post, I am asking you to compare top healthcare organizations with people in the context of one social media metric: Twitter followers. Take a look at the above graph. There is one key point I want to...
Can Regions with “Happy Tweets” Predict Obesity Prevalence? Maybe.
In a recently published study Twitter-derived neighborhood characteristics associated with obesity and diabetes, by analyzing 422,094 tweets over one year from the state of Utah, there was a good demonstration of the predictive value of tweets to determine population...