Heart Failure Academy: Outpatient, Non-clinical Education Class that Reduces Readmissions and Improves Self-care

Abstract

Introduction: There is growing popularity in social media use among physicians and health care practitioners for data collection and health promotion among cardiovascular disease. However, there is little knowledge regarding the ongoing dialogue, and who are communicating. Hypothesis: This is an exploratory study to capture the users and contents of tweets related to heart failure. Methods: We searched Twitter for these hash users and the hashtags #chf #congestiveheartfailure and #heartfailure between the dates of January 2017-March 2017. We we categorized the type of user and content of each tweet. For any discrepancies for categorization, another reviewer would examine the tweet. For the hashtag #heartfailure as there were more than 2500 tweets per month, we randomly selected 5% of tweets to hand code. Results: During this time period, users infrequently used #congestiveheartfailure and #chf, with only 37 and 222 tweets respectively, while #heartfailure was more commonly used. Within our random sample of coded tweets, 29.4% (204/693) of tweets were from patients, caretakers, or advocacy groups, while 35.2% (244/693) were from physicians, academic journals, medical groups, and industry. The most common content areas were medical education (such as journal articles) (34.6%, 240/693), disease awareness and advocacy (18.76%, 130/ 693), and personal experience (16.3%, 113/693). There was little overlap between discussions from patients and academic discussions, and lack of patient and academic engagement. There were few tweets of patients sharing journal articles (2 tweets), and by the lack of retweets between patients and physicians. Conclusions: Twitter, a social media platform, is used by both health care providers and patients. However, conversations are significantly siloed, and engagement between laypersons/advocacy groups and professionals were not observed.