By Luke Wilson 
Since 2012 we have been analysing the conversations of healthcare professionals (HCPs) online and have seen an increase in the number of HCPs using social media.
The number of verifiable HCPs has continued to grow since the launch of Twitter in 2006. This is also true in the United States (US), the country with the single largest number of identified HCPs by CREATION Pinpoint® (>175,000).
When compared to US physicians and US HCPs in general, US oncologists were slower to create accounts and make use of social media but are now increasing at a faster rate than their HCP peers. We would expect this behaviour to continue through 2019 where data is still being collected.
Methodology: how we analysed >1.2bn HCP social media posts
In 2012 we studied the behaviour of healthcare professionals (HCPs) who were using public social media channels. We observed the way they networked and collaborated, and the conversations that took place among them.
We developed CREATION Pinpoint®, our global HCP social media database, using a combination of human analysis and artificial intelligence (AI) to identify accounts that are likely to be HCPs. Every profile was reviewed and confirmed by one of our analysts: once the computer and the human confirmed this was a healthcare professional, the profile was classified as an HCP.
As our data grew, CREATION Pinpoint continued to gain intelligence. Eventually more than 1M decisions about HCP profiles had been made by our analysts, and we were able to leverage these decisions to refresh the platform’s machine learning process which has been tested at over 97% accuracy prior to human review and confirmation. Our analysts continue to classify HCP data, which the platform uses to keep learning.
To date we have analysed more than 1.2bn HCP tweets and are tracking more than 1.6M HCP profiles across multiple social media platforms. You can read how we use the collective intelligence of HCPs all over the world to discover what healthcare professionals think about anything, at CREATION Knowledge.
