A confluence of social media and health information technology may lead to quick predictions of adverse medical events, according to “Research To Sift Social Media for Early Signs of Adverse Drug Reactions” by H. Brevy Cannon: http://news.virginia.edu/content/research-sift-social-media-early-signs-adverse-drug-reactions.

Ahmed Abbassi, a professor of Information Technology at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce, will be joined by West Virginia University computer science professors, Donald Adjeroh and Anan Ross. They will be searching data as a follow-up to related research published in the ACM Transactions on Information Systems journal: http://tois.acm.org/.

“It’s not a big leap to use social media to glean product safety feedback...” according to H. Brevy Cannon ...social media presents a classic “big data” challenge: sifting through terabytes of noisy data to siphon out the nuggets of relevant and reliable information. With social media, information quality is always a concern; a single hypochondriac might produce dozens of unreliable reports of drug side-effects... Experts estimate that more than 20 percent of all medical information on the Web is spam.”

The data will be drawn from historical data (2002 to 2012) as well as fresh data gleaned from the 10 billion tweets posted every month. Of course, there is a a concern about false alarms. Two medical experts at West Virginia University, Marie Abate (School of Pharmacy professor) and Dr. Wanghong Zheng (psychiatrist and School of Medicine assistant professor) have been added to the team to reduce the risk of false positives.

There are a number of reasons why the study could be valuable:

1. Early product safety feedback for the F.D.A.
2. Reduced liability for pharmaceutical companies that screen data for signs of dangerous side effects
3. Authenticating valid data
4. Containment of misinformation
5. Identification of “drug on drug” adverse reactions

So don’t be surprised if Twitter is soon cited for its efficacy in analyzing data for adverse drug reactions. Tweets are likely to be the fastest and widest data pool for judging the effects of new pharmaceutical drugs over short-term periods.

David Nordella, the Managing Director of Provider Finance Associates, LLC, has found Twitter mixes with his passion for improving the profits of Independent Practice Associations. Learn more about David:

@BeneficentGuild
http://www.providerfinance411.com/
http://www.providerfinance411.com/blog/
http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidnordella
The “Independent Practice Associations” group on LinkedIn

Thanks for reading. Jason.
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