Organized Social Medical Communication in Radiation Oncology: Two-Year Trends of Structured Hashtags

Abstract

<h3>Purpose/Objective(s)</h3> For radiation oncology (RO), Twitter is a favored communication platform. Hashtags enable user-enhanced discussions and specific post-hoc analysis. As such, the first structured set of RO hashtags was introduced in 2019, in order to organize social media use. Our aim is to analyze the pattern of subsequent structured set use and re-evaluate its usefulness. <h3>Materials/Methods</h3> The initial set was submitted 03/2019 to analytics software and shared with the RO community at the ASTRO annual meeting 9/2019. We quantified the number of tweets for each hashtag by public accounts until 12/2021. For the top five tweeted hashtags, we captured the number of yearly tweets in the pre-deployment (09/2018- 08/2019) and post-deployment (09/2019- 08/2021) periods. Two popular RO-related hashtags (#DEIinRO and #WomenWhoCurie) were evaluated and compared to the two initially proposed. Finally, the stakeholder groups for the top five and newly incorporated hashtags were reported. <h3>Results</h3> The initial 2019 list contained 39 hashtags organized into nine categories. As of 12/2021, the top five hashtags by total number of tweets were respectively: #Radonc, #PallOnc, #MedPhys, #SurvOnc, and #SuppOnc. Six hashtags had less than 10 total tweets: #RadNTT, #OrganPres, #MedDosim, #CaHypox, #RTSim, and #StereoRT, and were eliminated. Post-deployment, a remarkable increase in the yearly tweets after 09/2019 was seen for #RadOnc (32%), #MedPhys (344%), and #SurvOnc (987%). Over the whole period, we observed an increasing use of #DEIinRO (n=2576) and #WomenWhoCurie (n=19309) compared to #RadOncDiversity (n=93) and #RadOncWomen (n=6629). The top stakeholders for all nine hashtags are identified as doctors. The increased use of the structured hashtags also extended to the non-providers category, such as patient advocates and media/journalists. After review, the updated set contains now 33 hashtags for continued use (Table 1). <h3>Conclusion</h3> This study is the first to report the influence of structured hashtags on RO Twitter communication. The two year-tracking data showed an increased popularity among health care providers, patients, and organizations. To maintain relevance, regular updates are needed. Future analysis can include sentiment analysis and text-based mining.