Hospitals, Health IT

Oncology hashtag project offers way to use social media to make finding accurate cancer info easier

An oncologist sees potential for oncology hashtag project to use social media as source of oncology education and advocacy.

A physician unveiled a poster at ASCO15 that demonstrated the interest in oncology on Twitter with the development of hashtags dedicated to specific types of cancer. The goal was to help stimulate and direct twitter conversations to provides another source of information, boost patient education and stimulate advocacy.

Dr. Matthew Katz, a radiation oncologist, founded Rad Nation, a community of radiation oncologists.

“Our hypothesis is that cancer-specific hashtags are a promising way to facilitate access to accurate health information and positive interactions,” Katz noted in the poster. “Our aim was to retrospectively evaluate Twitter use of the Cancer Tag Ontology and the types of users putting these hashtags into tweets.”

For each individual hashtag, we classified the 100 most active users by user type in the Symplur database, confirmed manually for accuracy by MSK. The most active new hashtags were those with organized Twitter-based chats…”

They include:

#ayacsm: Adolescent and young adult cancer; #gyncsm: Gynecological cancer #lcsm: Lung cancer; #mmsm: Multiple Myeloma;  and #pancsm: Pancreatic cancer.

In response to questions, Katz said the original purpose of developing the hashtags was to provide patients and caregivers with access to reliable, good quality health information. “Hashtags are a filter that can make it possible to make Twitter less noisy. Twitter has a lot of discussion of healthcare, but finding reliable information is not as easy.

“Patient-physician engagement is important, but the purpose is not to enhance therapeutic relationships. The disease-specific tags may be a way to adapt Twitter’s open platform to focus conversations and bring people together for education, advocacy and support.”

Here’s an abstract on the study.

Photo: Bigstock Photo

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