Can Anonymous Patient Posters on Health Forums be Identified?

Remember Sara Baker, a "fake" patient created by MedSeek, a health IT company? See "Nobody Knows You're a Fake Patient on the Internet!" Identifying fake patients who post to health forums is pretty straight forward. I have been very successful doing it for years (read "Web 2.0 Pharma Marketing Tricks for Dummies," for example).Some time ago, PatientsLikeMe had to take action against a "fake patient," which was actually a software bot trolling the site reading and analyzing posts. "This user was not a patient," said Ben Heywood, co-founder of PatientsLikeMe, "but rather a computer program that scrapes (i.e. reads and stores) forum information" (see "Data Mining in the Deep, Dark Social Networks of Patients").But, how easy easy is it to learn the identity of a REAL patient who posts anonymously to health forums such as PatientsLikeMe?It may be easier than many patients think."Authorship Attributor" systems that use text analysis techniques to crawl health forums can automatically correlate messages written by the same authors, which,  according to authors of a study recently published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), "makes an automated identification of the author of an online post possible" (see below and read the entire open access article here).The implications of the research reported in JMIR is more scary than dealing with fake online patients. "Given that individuals may be reluctant to share personal health information on online f...
Source: Pharma Marketing Blog - Category: Pharma Commentators Tags: fPatient Discussion Forum patientslikeme Source Type: blogs