Abstract
Introduction: Physical distancing during the coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic has brought telehealth to the forefront to keep up with patient care amidst an international crisis that is exhausting healthcare resources. Understanding and managing health-related concerns resulting from physical distancing measures are of utmost importance.Objectives: To describe and analyze the volume, content, and geospatial distribution of tweets associated with telehealth during the Covid-19 pandemic.Methods: We inquired Twitter public data to access tweets related to telehealth from March 30, 2020 to April 6, 2020. We analyzed tweets using natural language processing (NLP) and unsupervised learning methods. Clustering analysis was performed to classify tweets. Geographic tweet distribution was correlated with Covid-19 confirmed cases in the United States. All analyses were carried on the Google Cloud computing service “Google Colab” using Python libraries (Python Software Foundation).Results: A total of 41,329 tweets containing the term “telehealth” were retrieved. The most common terms appearing alongside ‘telehealth’ were “covid”, “health”, “care”, “services”, “patients”, and “pandemic”. Mental health was the most common health-related topic that appeared in our search reflecting a high need for mental healthcare during the pandemic. Similarly, Medicare was the most common appearing health plan mirroring the accelerated access to telehealth and change in coverage policies. The geographic distribution of tweets related to telehealth and having a specific location within the United States (n=19,367) was significantly associated with the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases reported in each state (p<0.001).Conclusion: Social media activity is an accurate reflection of disease burden during the Covid-19 pandemic. Widespread adoption of telehealth-favoring policies is necessary and mostly needed to address mental health problems that may arise in areas of high infection and death rates.
Highlights
Physical distancing during the coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic has brought telehealth to the forefront to keep up with patient care amidst an international crisis that is exhausting healthcare resources
The novel coronavirus outbreak that started in Wuhan, China entered a new phase after the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared it as a global pandemic on March 11, 2020 [1]
Our study aims to analyze the dynamics of social media data related to telehealth and understand the public activity to strategically optimize and accelerate the digital health transformation
Summary
Physical distancing during the coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic has brought telehealth to the forefront to keep up with patient care amidst an international crisis that is exhausting healthcare resources. Twitter (Twitter, Inc., San Francisco, CA) has been considered among the best social media platforms for keeping its users on top of the most trending topics and in understanding consumers’ opinions on health technology matters [5]. For this reason, we planned to explore the data available on social media to better characterize the surge in telehealth during the Covid-19 pandemic. Our study aims to analyze the dynamics of social media data related to telehealth and understand the public activity to strategically optimize and accelerate the digital health transformation
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