Healthcare Social Media Research: how should it be done? where should it be published?

Those of you who are interested in healthcare social media must have given some thought to the questions posed by research regarding healthcare social media.What happens when we use traditional research methods to study Healthcare Social Media ? Do we publish the results according to the principles of traditional scientific journals?Do we, given the subject, avoid paid subscriber-only journals ? An article* from researchers at U Penn Medical School and which was just published in PubMed demonstrates some of the issues around the above questions. The authors' purpose is to analyze the use of Twitter on the topic of resuscitation and cardiac arrest. 62000 tweets were examined on the basis of a series of keywords relating to cardiac arrest and resuscitation. Author profiles, retweets, time of day, were studied. The findings demonstrate the difficulty of doing research on tweets. Here are three key results - the issue being that this research was observational and you can only observe the things Twitter allows us to measure.Only 25% of the examined tweets included specific information on the topic - a fact which merits further analysis...75% of tweets containing keywords do not have information on the topic???13% of tweets were retweeted...meaning that we can't count on retweeting to diffuse a message.Users with more than 15 resuscitation-specific tweets tended to have 1787 followers (which is a high average number).The conclusion...
Source: Denise Silber's eHealth - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: Doctors 2.0 Health 2.0 Quality of healthcare Source Type: blogs