Symplur has played a big role in popularizing healthcare hashtags for Twitter to guide people on Twitter looking for specific topic threads, conference conversations and people to follow. It’s recorded 512.9 million tweets spanning 10,000 healthcare topics. Symplur combines big data analysis and its healthcare social media know-how in a new business intelligence channel called Symplur Signals, according to a company statement.
The move reflects the growing level of interest in generating useful insights about how people are using and following Twitter across healthcare. The questions it’s getting center on what kind of articles specialists are reading, the rise and fall of certain conditions, who are the influential bloggers and what they’re talking about, and what’s trending among patient communities.
Pharmaceutical companies are particularly hungry for this information and have developed social media teams that scan Twitter and other social media channels for relevant trends and information. But it’s also of interest to payers, researchers and healthcare facilities which are increasingly depending on this information to get a better read of the patient populations they serve.
Symplur co-founder Auden Utengen said in the statement that the big data analysis it provides is intended to make it easier for healthcare professionals and academics to follow trends.
“We designed this new subscription-based model enabling our users easy access to more data points, and most importantly to interact directly with our system,” he said.
Several companies provide big data analysis of healthcare social media such as IMS Health, Teradata and McKinsey, among others. But younger companies are also providing analytical tools to help pharmaceutical companies identify where to reach their physician customers such as Medikly, a Blueprint Health accelerator graduate.
