Abstract
BackgroundTwitter is a potentially valuable tool for public health officials and state Medicaid programs in the United States, which provide public health insurance to 72 million Americans.ObjectiveWe aim to characterize how Medicaid agencies and managed care organization (MCO) health plans are using Twitter to communicate with the public.MethodsUsing Twitter’s public application programming interface, we collected 158,714 public posts (“tweets”) from active Twitter profiles of state Medicaid agencies and MCOs, spanning March 2014 through June 2019. Manual content analyses identified 5 broad categories of content, and these coded tweets were used to train supervised machine learning algorithms to classify all collected posts.ResultsWe identified 15 state Medicaid agencies and 81 Medicaid MCOs on Twitter. The mean number of followers was 1784, the mean number of those followed was 542, and the mean number of posts was 2476. Approximately 39% of tweets came from just 10 accounts. Of all posts, 39.8% (63,168/158,714) were classified as general public health education and outreach; 23.5% (n=37,298) were about specific Medicaid policies, programs, services, or events; 18.4% (n=29,203) were organizational promotion of staff and activities; and 11.6% (n=18,411) contained general news and news links. Only 4.5% (n=7142) of posts were responses to specific questions, concerns, or complaints from the public.ConclusionsTwitter has the potential to enhance community building, beneficiary engagement, and public health outreach, but appears to be underutilized by the Medicaid program.
Highlights
20% of online adults use Twitter [1], a social media platform that allows users to share short messages (“tweets”)
Prior studies suggest that overall social media use is independent of educational attainment, race/ethnicity, education, income, and health care access [2]
We identified active Twitter profiles of state Medicaid agencies and Medicaid managed care organizations (MCOs), which are health insurance plans that contract with states to provide Medicaid health benefits and related services
Summary
20% of online adults use Twitter [1], a social media platform that allows users to share short messages (“tweets”). With over 500 million tweets per day on topics including health-related issues, Twitter is a potentially valuable tool for public health officials to engage the public. Prior studies suggest that overall social media use is independent of educational attainment, race/ethnicity, education, income, and health care access [2]. A minority of local public health departments and federal health agencies in the United States use Twitter [4], and these accounts typically have low public engagement [5]. Twitter is a potentially valuable tool for public health officials and state Medicaid programs in the United States, which provide public health insurance to 72 million Americans
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