In pandemic mitigation, strategies such as social distancing and mask-wearing are vital to prevent disease resurgence. Yet, monitoring adherence is challenging, as individuals might be reluctant to share behavioral data with public health authorities. To address this challenge and demonstrate a framework for conducting observational research with sensitive data in a privacy-conscious manner, we employ a privacy-centric epidemiological study design: the federated cohort.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Participatory surveillance of self-reported symptoms and vaccination status can be used to supplement traditional public health surveillance and provide insights into vaccine effectiveness and changes in the symptoms produced by an infectious disease. The University of Maryland COVID Trends and Impact Survey provides an example of participatory surveillance that leveraged Facebook's active user base to provide self-reported symptom and vaccination data in near real-time.
Methods: Here, we develop a methodology for identifying changes in vaccine effectiveness and COVID-19 symptomatology using the University of Maryland COVID Trends and Impact Survey data from three middle-income countries (Guatemala, Mexico, and South Africa).
JMIR Public Health Surveill
April 2023
Background: The third most severe COVID-19 wave in the middle of 2021 coincided with the dual challenges of limited vaccine supply and lagging acceptance in Bangkok, Thailand. Understanding of persistent vaccine hesitancy during the "608" campaign to vaccinate those aged over 60 years and 8 medical risk groups was needed. On-the-ground surveys place further demands on resources and are scale limited.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSimultaneously tracking the global impact of COVID-19 is challenging because of regional variation in resources and reporting. Leveraging self-reported survey outcomes via an existing international social media network has the potential to provide standardized data streams to support monitoring and decision-making worldwide, in real time, and with limited local resources. The University of Maryland Global COVID-19 Trends and Impact Survey (UMD-CTIS), in partnership with Facebook, has invited daily cross-sectional samples from the social media platform's active users to participate in the survey since its launch on April 23, 2020.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Pao is the gold standard to assess acute hypoxic respiratory failure, but it is only routinely available by intermittent spot checks, precluding any automatic continuous analysis for bedside tools.
Objective: To validate a continuous and noninvasive method to estimate hypoxemia severity for all Spo values.
Derivation Cohort: All patients who had an arterial blood gas and simultaneous continuous noninvasive monitoring from 2011 to 2019 at Boston Children's Hospital (Boston, MA) PICU.
Background: Discrimination in the health care system contributes to worse health outcomes among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) patients.
Objective: The aim of this study is to examine disparities in patient experience among LGBTQ persons using social media data.
Methods: We collected patient experience data from Twitter from February 2013 to February 2017 in the United States.
Background: Racial and ethnic minority groups often face worse patient experiences compared with the general population, which is directly related to poorer health outcomes within these minority populations. Evaluation of patient experience among racial and ethnic minority groups has been difficult due to lack of representation in traditional health care surveys.
Objective: This study aims to assess the feasibility of Twitter for identifying racial and ethnic disparities in patient experience across the United States from 2013 to 2016.
The geographic variation of human movement is largely unknown, mainly due to a lack of accurate and scalable data. Here we describe global human mobility patterns, aggregated from over 300 million smartphone users. The data cover nearly all countries and 65% of Earth's populated surface, including cross-border movements and international migration.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLimited research has evaluated these equitable policies because of the difficulty of capturing LGBTQ patient experience. Previous studies have shown that LGBTQ persons report increased rates of discrimination across a wide variety of healthcare settings which may prevent them from disclosing their LGBTQ status. The goal of this research was to use a social media big dataset to evaluate the impact of equitable policies on patient experiences for LGBTQ persons.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: There are documented differences in access to health care across the United States. Previous research indicates that Web-based data regarding patient experiences and opinions of health care are available from Twitter. Sentiment analyses of Twitter data can be used to examine differences in patient views of health care across the United States.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRationale: Persons who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) face health inequities due to unwarranted discrimination against their sexual orientation or identity. An important contributor to LGBT health disparities is the inequitable or substandard care that LGBT individuals receive from hospitals.
Objective: To investigate inequities in hospital care among LGBT patients using the popular social media platform Twitter.
Although digital reports of disease are currently used by public health officials for disease surveillance and decision making, little is known about environmental factors and compositional characteristics that may influence reporting patterns. The objective of this study is to quantify the association between climate, demographic and socio-economic factors on digital reporting of disease at the US county level. We reference approximately 1.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Public Health Manag Pract
June 2018
Context: Foodborne illness affects 1 in 4 US residents each year. Few of those sickened seek medical care or report the illness to public health authorities, complicating prevention efforts. Citizens who report illness identify food establishments with more serious and critical violations than found by regular inspections.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Patients routinely use Twitter to share feedback about their experience receiving healthcare. Identifying and analysing the content of posts sent to hospitals may provide a novel real-time measure of quality, supplementing traditional, survey-based approaches.
Objective: To assess the use of Twitter as a supplemental data stream for measuring patient-perceived quality of care in US hospitals and compare patient sentiments about hospitals with established quality measures.
IEEE Trans Syst Man Cybern B Cybern
October 2010
Social reasoning and norms among individuals that share cultural traits are largely fashioned by those traits. We have explored predominant sociological and cultural traits. We offer a methodology for parametrically adjusting relevant traits.
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