By Daniel Ghinn 
This week at Health2.0 Conference in Barcelona (#health2eu) I will unveil the Creation Pinpoint® Oncology Project for the very first time. It’s the latest in a series of technology innovations that give Creation Healthcare the world’s most powerful insights from healthcare professionals in public social media.
Since we launched Creation Pinpoint in 2013, the world’s first ever service dedicated to learning from healthcare professionals in public social media, our research has been widely recognised as leading its field. Our free publication on HCP research, HCP Digital Opinion Leaders, has provided ground-breaking insights into health reform, policy and disease from doctors’ social media activity. Research from Creation Pinpoint has been featured all around the world including at Stanford University’s Medicine X; twice at Doctors 2.0 & You; and several times at Health2.0 conferences in the United States and Europe. In April this year, PharmaVOICE Magazine featured Creation Pinpoint in its special innovation issue.
With this week’s launch of the Creation Pinpoint Oncology Project we have built upon everything we knew so far about healthcare professionals in public social media. From our interviews with doctors, we knew that many doctors love to learn from the experiences of international colleagues they would not have met without social media. We know that when they find a topic of interest, they engage in open dialogue, often in a kind of real-time peer review of new ideas. And we know that increasing numbers of experienced specialists are collaborating openly online.
Oncology conversations
Conventional social media analysis tools use numerous measures to profile an individual’s level of engagement or influence with others online, or to track followers or ‘hashtag’ use. But with Creation Pinpoint our interest is in the distilled voice of healthcare professionals. And in the Creation Pinpoint Oncology Project, we are specifically interested in the two-way conversations that take place among a single group of specialists: oncologists.
While social media is filled with the ‘noise’ of posts and hashtags, some of the most significant conversations take place among small groups of individuals posting directly and openly to each other. We see healthcare professionals tweeting peers when they want to ensure direct engagement with that individual, in a public forum that is also open to the voice (and ears) of others.
So we started this initiative by singling out 1,000 of the world’s most engaged oncologists in social media, those we might think of as oncologist ‘Digital Opinion Leaders’ based on their online behaviors.
The Creation Pinpoint Oncology Project identifies the world’s most engaged oncologists in public social media.
A new kind of virtual network
Then we built a platform that focuses on the conversations they have with each other, as they happen. We mapped out a new kind of virtual network: the network of oncologists’ conversations. This network is not about followers or followings, but maps the oncologists who a particular specialist is talking with from among their oncology peers. By allowing an individual oncologist to see others who are talking with the peers they have conversed with themselves, doctors can discover and explore the profiles of others with similar interests.
An oncologist can discover more about the conversations of any of their peers in the system by viewing their conversational profile. A ‘conversations’ tab (see above) shows the most recent conversations that the specialist has had with other oncologists, and a word cloud shows the most popular topics covered in those peer exchanges. Unlike some of the more general ‘topics’ outputs often seen in social media monitoring platforms, this ‘conversation topics’ word cloud focuses only on content from two-way dialogue with fellow oncologists.
Online influence among oncology peers
To further explore which peers an individual oncologist references, the ‘influenced by’ tab lists oncologists most referenced in recent peer conversations, alongside a list of the oncologists who have started conversations that the individual has joined. A chart illustrates the ratio of oncologist role types among peers who currently influence an individual.
The Creation Pinpoint Oncology Project shows which oncology peers an oncologist is currently ‘influenced by’
The content of engaging posts and links shared is summarised, enabling a user to click through to the original post, read and optionally participate in the conversation.
Additional behavioural insights are included in the form of charts showing the platforms an oncologist uses when conversing with peers.
To analyse the extent to which an oncologist is referenced by, or has started conversations replied to by their oncology peers, the ‘Influencing’ tab provides a set of indicators and shows the types of oncologists most influenced by an individual. A clickable list of the oncologist’s most engaging posts and links is also included to allow others to explore and join in.
The Creation Pinpoint Oncology Project shows which oncology peers an individual oncologist is most referenced by
The Creation Pinpoint Oncology Project provides quick links to an individual’s posts that other oncologists have found most engaging
Available now for oncologists
The Creation Pinpoint Oncology Project is available now exclusively to selected oncologists through our beta program, and to Creation Healthcare’s research team where it will add new capabilities to our powerful suite of Creation Pinpoint HCP insights tools.
In the coming weeks and months I look forward to seeing how the platform supports greater focused engagement and learning about oncology and the topics that matter to specialists in this field of healthcare.
If you work for a healthcare provider, healthcare company, government or NGO, we’d love to help you discover how our Creation Pinpoint service can help you learn from healthcare professionals in public social media. Please do get in touch to find out more.
