Shoults Catherine C, Dawson Leah, Hayes Corey, Eswaran Hari
Institute for Digital Health and Innovation, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, Arkansas, USA.
Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, Arkansas, USA.
Telemed Rep. 2023 Aug 3;4(1):236-248. doi: 10.1089/tmr.2023.0008. eCollection 2023.
Social media is used as a source of information and platform to discuss health care; however, there is little research on discussion of telehealth in social media. Past research has looked at individual platforms, but a comparison of discussion on two platforms (Reddit and Twitter) has not been performed. Understanding telehealth-related social media discourse and the differences between platforms may provide insights into how telehealth is characterized online and which platforms provide patient perspectives. The COVID-19 pandemic provides a unique case study to examine how social media users approached both Reddit and Twitter during an international health crisis. This study used natural language processing tools and two social media platforms to (1) characterize and contrast each platform's telehealth-related posts according to themes and (2) assess the frequency of telehealth and telehealth-related terms posts before and during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
We collected 6 years (2016 through 2021) of social media posts from Twitter and Reddit. The themes of the corpus were extracted using hashtags, subreddits, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and were analyzed using descriptive statistics.
Both Twitter and Reddit showed exponential growth in the use of the term "telehealth" and telehealth-related terms in early 2020. The use of telehealth-related terms and discussion of COVID-19 coincided in both social media sites; however, other themes were discussed, including how to use telehealth. Reddit LDA clusters showed greatest usage of "telehealth" when associated with using or suggesting telehealth for receiving therapy, counseling, or psychoanalysis while Twitter focused on sharing telehealth news, products, and services.
Twitter and Reddit had extensive growth in the use of telehealth-related terms after the COVID-19 pandemic. Twitter and Reddit showed themes connecting COVID-19 to telehealth, especially in reference to services, therapy, and counseling, however, Reddit had more discussion suggesting use of telehealth services or requesting peer insights into how to use telehealth as compared with Twitter, which appeared more focused on telehealth as a business or product.
社交媒体被用作获取信息和讨论医疗保健的平台；然而，关于社交媒体中远程医疗讨论的研究很少。过去的研究关注的是单个平台，但尚未对两个平台（Reddit和Twitter）上的讨论进行比较。了解与远程医疗相关的社交媒体话语以及平台之间的差异，可能有助于深入了解远程医疗在网络上的特点，以及哪些平台能提供患者视角。新冠疫情提供了一个独特的案例研究，以考察在国际卫生危机期间社交媒体用户如何使用Reddit和Twitter。本研究使用自然语言处理工具和两个社交媒体平台来：（1）根据主题对每个平台上与远程医疗相关的帖子进行特征描述和对比；（2）评估新冠疫情爆发前和期间远程医疗及与远程医疗相关术语帖子的出现频率。
我们收集了来自Twitter和Reddit的6年（2016年至2021年）社交媒体帖子。语料库的主题通过主题标签、子版块和潜在狄利克雷分配（LDA）提取，并使用描述性统计进行分析。
Twitter和Reddit在2020年初“远程医疗”一词及与远程医疗相关术语的使用均呈指数增长。两个社交媒体平台上与远程医疗相关术语的使用和对新冠疫情的讨论同时出现；然而，还讨论了其他主题，包括如何使用远程医疗。Reddit的LDA聚类显示，当“远程医疗”与使用或建议使用远程医疗接受治疗、咨询或心理分析相关联时，其使用频率最高，而Twitter则侧重于分享远程医疗新闻、产品和服务。
新冠疫情后，Twitter和Reddit上与远程医疗相关术语的使用有广泛增长。Twitter和Reddit都显示出将新冠疫情与远程医疗联系起来的主题，特别是在服务、治疗和咨询方面，然而，与Twitter相比，Reddit有更多讨论建议使用远程医疗服务或寻求关于如何使用远程医疗的同行见解，Twitter似乎更关注远程医疗作为一种业务或产品。
