Social media continues to change how advocacy organizations mobilize, educate, and connect with their constituents. One of the most unique yet understudied tools available on social media platforms is the hashtag. Little research exists on how social work and advocacy organizations use hashtags, much less on how such use can be effective. This study examines the hashtag use by 105 constituent members of the National Health Council, a national US-based patient/health advocacy coalition. The study presents an inductive coding scheme of the types of hashtags employed, analyzes inter-sectoral differences in hashtag usage, and examines the relationship between hashtag use and measures of the effectiveness of social media messages.
Medical care services can be organized into a network. Understanding the structure of this network cannot only help analyze common clinical protocols but can also help reveal previously unknown patterns of care. The objective of this research is to introduce the concept and methods for constructing and analyzing the network of medical care services. We start by demonstrating how to build the network itself and then develop algorithms, based on principal component analysis and social network analysis, to detect communities of services. Finally, we propose novel graphical techniques for representing and assessing patterns of care. We demonstrate the application of our algorithms using data from an Emergency Department in New York State. One of the implications of our research is that clinical experts could use our algorithms to detect deviations from either existing protocols of care or administrative norms.
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