FrançaisSocial Media: Avandia report chronicles patient observations on cardio issues. #hcsmeu
The question comes up regularly -- what does social media conversation bring to medicine and health? Is it just an echo chamber or do things happen thanks to it ? One of the best and possibly most-cited example of Social Media's "efficacy" so far has been Patients Like Me, who, amongst others, enables patients to not only find other patients with similar issues but also to review data patterns thanks to the observations of hundreds or thousands of people. So, PatientsLikeMe goes beyond conversation by providing a concrete Health 2.0 toolkit.
Introducing Woollabs whose self-styled description is "Business Intelligence through Social Cognition." The company's new independent report on Avandia, based on analysis of comments and conversations taking on place social media platforms, is very clear.
Using technology that enables Woollabs to provide what it considers to be a complete review of what is being said on the web on a given subject, their researchers were able to chronicle, year after year, the growing awareness by patients of the cardiovascular problems posed by Avandia.
As the report's author noted, conversation topics on the web showed "dramatic change." After having been very positive regarding the drug, by 2005, patients felt that physicians were downplaying their observations about overweight and oedema. By 2006, patients began to see a link between the drug and congestive heart failure...Over the following years, patients' concerns intensified and the report shows that their anger moved progressively from the drug to the pharmaceutical company producing it to the FDA. What no individual patient or even physician may see, can be understood through the confrontation of multiple experiences and conversations over time...
Should the report have been called: what social media can bring to the quality of care? That would have been my choice...
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