scholarly journals The influence of social media on recruitment to surgical trials.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carly Nichola Bisset ◽  
Ben Carter ◽  
Jennifer Law ◽  
Jonathan Hewitt ◽  
Kat Parmar ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Social media is changing the way surgeons communicate worldwide with a key role in disseminating trial results. However, it is unclear if social media could be used in recruitment to surgical trials. This study aimed to investigate the influence of Twitter in promoting surgical recruitment in The Emergency Laparotomy and Frailty (ELF) Study. Methods The ELF Study was a UK prospective, observational cohort that aimed to assess the influence of frailty on 90-day mortality in older adults undergoing emergency surgery. A power calculation required 500 patients to be recruited in 12 weeks to detect a 10% change in mortality associated with frailty. A Twitter handle was designed (@ELFStudy) with eye-catching logos to encourage enrolment and inform the public and clinicians involved in the study. Twitter Analytics and an online analytics tool (Twitonomy; Digonomy Pty Ltd) were used to analyse trends in user engagement. Results After 90 days of data collection, a total of 49 sites from Scotland, England and Wales recruited 952 consecutive patients undergoing emergency laparotomy. Target recruitment (n=500) was achieved by week 11. A total of 591 tweets were published by @ELFStudy since its conception, making 218,136 impressions at time of writing. The number of impressions prior to March 20 th 2017 (study commencement date) was 23,335 (343.2 per tweet), compared to the recruitment period with 114,314 impressions (256.3 per tweet), ending on June 20 th 2017. Each additional tweet was associated with an increase in recruitment of 1.66 (95%CI 1.36 to 1.97; p<0.001). Conclusion The ELF Study over-recruited by nearly 100%, reaching over 200,000 people across the U.K. Branding enhanced tweet aesthetics and helped increase tweet engagement to stimulate discussion and healthy competition amongst clinicians to aid trial recruitment. Other studies may draw from the social media experiences of the ELF Study to optimise collaboration amongst researchers. Trial Registration This study is registered online at www.clinicaltrials.gov (registration number NCT02952430) and has been approved by the National Health Service Research Ethics Committee.

BMJ Open ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (10) ◽  
pp. e017928 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kat L Parmar ◽  
Lyndsay Pearce ◽  
Ian Farrell ◽  
Jonathan Hewitt ◽  
Susan Moug

IntroductionThe National Emergency Laparotomy Audit (NELA) has reported that older patients (≥65 years) form a large percentage of emergency high-risk cases with increased postoperative morbidity and mortality. With the population continuing to age rapidly, it is clear that a greater understanding of the factors affecting surgical outcomes in older patients is required. Frailty is a relatively new concept taking into account a variety of factors that increase an individual’s vulnerability to increased dependency and death. Research has suggested that high frailty scores increase postoperative complications, length of stay and mortality but the majority of these studies have been carried out on elective patients. Knowledge of how frailty affects patients in an emergency setting would aid clinicians’ and patients’ decision-making process.Methods and analysisThis multicentre study will include consecutive adult patients aged 65 years and over undergoing emergency laparotomies over a 3-month period at 52 National Health Service hospitals across the UK. The primary outcome will be 90-day mortality. Secondary outcomes will include length of hospital stay, 30-day complications, change in level of independence and 30-day readmission. This study has been powered to detect a 10% change in mortality associated with frailty (n=500 patients).Ethics and disseminationThis study has been approved by the National Health Service Research Ethics Committee. It has been registered centrally with HRA for English sites, NRSPCC for Scottish sites and Health and Care Research Permissions Service for sites in Wales.Dissemination will be via international and national surgical and geriatric conferences. In addition, manuscripts will be prepared following the close of the project.Trial registration numberThis study is also registered online atwww.clinicaltrials.gov(registration numberNCT02952430).


2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
LF Cabrera Vargas ◽  
G Herrera ◽  
A Mendoza Zuchini ◽  
M Pedraza ◽  
S Sánchez ◽  
...  

Resumen En el campo de la medicina las redes sociales han ganado poco a poco terreno y hoy en día juegan un rol importante en el aprendizaje y la enseñanza de conocimientos que se pueden trasmitir de inmediato y de forma masiva. El objetivo de este artículo es mostrar la experiencia colombiana en el uso de las redes sociales para crear aprendizaje quirúrgico significativo, con liderazgo y tutoría global. Se llevó a cabo un estudio descriptivo retrospectivo desde la creación de nuestras redes sociales en Twitter, 22 de febrero al 22 de agosto de 2019, evaluando las siguientes variables: número de tweets académicos, número de seguidores, impresiones, visitas y menciones. Desde la creación de nuestra red social Twitter @Cirbosque para realizar educación virtual quirúrgica a través de redes sociales con el fin de generar un aprendizaje significativo en nuestros seguidores, en solo seis meses del proyecto, seguimos a 62 cuentas, hemos realizado hasta la fecha 5.025 tweets académicos, con un crecimiento del 77,1% mensual, con 2.203 seguidores, con un crecimiento del 426 seguidores mensual, 1.090.000 impresiones, con un crecimiento del 56% mensual, 13.500 mil visitas, con un crecimiento del 28,9% mensual y 2.028 menciones, con un crecimiento del 88,3% mensual. Aunque la evidencia aún es insuficiente para garantizar que la educación que se hace a través de redes sociales y de @Cirbosque sea eficiente, el impacto que ha tenido esta iniciativa en Twitter es apreciada por muchos cirujanos a nivel mundial incluyendo a grandes maestros referentes en cada uno de los temas que se han tratado, de la misma forma, la cantidad de participantes en las diversas discusiones planteadas día a día y con un incremento en todos los indicadores de impacto según Twitter Analytics, se puede deducir que el mensaje educativo está teniendo un efecto positivo y está llegando a miles de personas a nivel mundial.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 451-476 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mona Khattab

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, misinformation and unscientific interpretations flooded the internet. Seeking credible information in Egypt was paramount at the time. An answer to this quest was ‘Ask Nameesa’, an award-winning Egyptian-focused chatbot that utilizes Facebook Messenger to communicate with social media users in an individualized response engagement. It relies on information validated by WHO and the Egyptian Ministry of Health. This article examines the structure of Ask Nameesa as an example of infobots and studies the interactive engagement it offers users to provide health information. The study analyses data gathered by interviewing the founder and CEO of DXwand, the company that developed Ask Nameesa as well as content analysis of conversations with Ask Nameesa to assess its user engagement. The study aims at understanding the potential Ask Nameesa has in providing information literacy and tackling public demand for information.


BJS Open ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
G Mackenzie ◽  
R Grossman ◽  
J Mayol

Abstract Background Twitter engagement between surgeons provides opportunities for international discussion of research and clinical practice. Understanding how surgical tweet chats work is important at a time when increasing reliance is being placed on virtual engagement because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods Individual tweets from the May 2019 #BJSConnect tweet chat were extracted using NodeXL, complemented by Twitter searches in an internet browser to identify responses that had not used the hashtag. Aggregate estimates of tweet views were obtained from a third-party social media tool (Twitonomy) and compared with official Twitter Analytics measurements. Results In total 37 Twitter accounts posted 248 tweets or replies relating to the tweet chat. A further 110 accounts disseminated the tweets via retweeting. Only 58.5 per cent of these tweets and 35 per cent of the tweeters were identified through a search for the #BJSConnect hashtag. The rest were identified by searching for replies (61), quoting tweets (20), and posts by @BJSurgery that used the hashtag but did not appear in the Twitter search (22). Studying all tweets revealed complex branching discussions that went beyond the discussed paper’s findings. Third-party estimates of potential reach of the tweet chat were greatly exaggerated. Conclusion Understanding the extent of the discussion generated by the #BJSConnect tweet chat required looking beyond the hashtag to identify replies and other responses, which was time-consuming. Estimates of reach using a third-party tool were unreliable.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-132
Author(s):  
Shirley Law Kheen ◽  
◽  
Mohd Nazri Mohd Noor ◽  

This paper aims to develop a framework for mobile social commerce purchase decisions based on the existing literature. Social media and mobile technology advancement has shifted the way contemporary selling is conducted online. This new business model has revolutionised the relationship between consumers and businesses. Mobile social commerce integrates the features of social media, which enables the interactions between users during their mobile shopping experience. Users’ creativities provide innovative solutions in user generated content (UGC) that not only solves their own problems, but also provides possible improvements to products and services. Even so, the authenticity of UGC and the possibility of fabrication remains a challenge that needs to be resolved. Previous studies have shown that user engagement in UGC has a significant effect on enhancing the efficiency of social interaction between businesses and consumers. The corresponding purchasing decisions depend on the degree of consumer involvement in UGC. Based on a review of the literature from 2010 – 2020, the positive attitudes towards online community knowledge sharing will positively influence consumers’ purchasing decisions. A favourable review about the products or services that generate strong positive attitudes is more likely to be considered by consumers. Thus, their purchasing decisions are determined by their commitment to an attitude. The risk perception of consumers differs from various dimensions and capacities. The risk tolerance of each purchasing goal will have an effect on their purchasing decisions. The framework proposed in this study can be further tested in the context of Malaysian consumers.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jarett Anderson ◽  
Austin Hamp ◽  
Michelle Militello ◽  
Ryan Geist ◽  
Jaclyn Anderson ◽  
...  

BACKGROUND Clinical trials are an essential process in discovering new biomedical or behavioral outcomes in disease processes. There are several steps involved in creating a clinical trial. One step, patient recruitment, is often touted as the largest contributor to trial delays, which has financial, scientific, and ethical ramifications. Approximately 1.2 billion dollars in the United States is spent each year on this process and as many as 86% of clinical trials do not meet recruitment targets within their perspective timeframes, and 19% of trials had to be terminated early due to insufficient recruitment and/or patient retention1. Social media is a viable, inexpensive tool that can be utilized to improve both recruitment and retention rates2. To date, platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and others have been widely utilized in recruitment for clinical trials, communication among stakeholders, and educational tools. Social media also has the advantage of reaching populations that otherwise would be more difficult to reach3. A list of these platforms and each of their distinct advantages for clinical trial recruitment can be found in Table 1. This review aims to highlight the unique characteristics of several social media platforms and their advantageous properties in increasing recruitment and retention during clinical trials. OBJECTIVE This narrative review analyzes the current use of several social media sites in clinical trial recruitment and retention. It also offers insight concerning potential uses of these sites that are not currently utilized. METHODS A literature search was performed using PubMed, Google Scholar, and ResearchGate to access and review relevant articles published in peer-reviewed journals concerning social media and its use in clinical trials. Two independent researchers with education and experience in dermatology screened publications to select studies featuring quantitative results concerning social media and clinical trial recruitment. RESULTS 13 social media applications were studied and reviewed. 7 of these social media sites or applications have currently been studied, and their use in complementing traditional recruiting methods such as advertisements in newspapers, health fairs, and direct mailing, has been analyzed and reported. 6 additional social media applications have further been studied, and their potential use within clinical trial research has been additionally analyzed. CONCLUSIONS A large number and variety of social media platforms exist to aid in the recruitment and retention process for clinical trials, many of which can utilize niche features and reach a targeted demographic. Although recruitment remains a barrier for researchers involved in clinical trials, the potential to recruit through social media may be underutilized. Many avenues that exist to improve recruitment have not been leveraged. For example, partnering to create collaborative videos with social media influencers on platforms such as Instagram and Youtube may help to broaden the audience and increase clinical trial enrollments. Creating biomedical educational profiles or channels that discuss details of clinical trials with descriptions of these trials could also be employed to increase the scope of the audience. Reddit, Smart Patients, and Patients Like Me can target difficult-to-reach patient populations due to their use of subgroups, allowing researchers to reach their target audience. Additionally, many of these platforms provide user engagement features that allow users to respond directly to videos or posts and could be used to encourage enrollment by allowing users to react directly to clinical trial advertisements.


2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 15-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Haggerty ◽  
Mark C. Casson ◽  
Sheryllynne Haggerty ◽  
Mark J. Taylor

The increasing use of social media, applications or platforms that allow users to interact online, ensures that this environment will provide a useful source of evidence for the forensics examiner. Current tools for the examination of digital evidence find this data problematic as they are not designed for the collection and analysis of online data. Therefore, this paper presents a framework for the forensic analysis of user interaction with social media. In particular, it presents an inter-disciplinary approach for the quantitative analysis of user engagement to identify relational and temporal dimensions of evidence relevant to an investigation. This framework enables the analysis of large data sets from which a (much smaller) group of individuals of interest can be identified. In this way, it may be used to support the identification of individuals who might be ‘instigators’ of a criminal event orchestrated via social media, or a means of potentially identifying those who might be involved in the ‘peaks’ of activity. In order to demonstrate the applicability of the framework, this paper applies it to a case study of actors posting to a social media Web site.


2020 ◽  
pp. 107769902095971
Author(s):  
Jihyang Choi ◽  
Sang Yup Lee ◽  
Sung Wook Ji

This study sheds new light on the relationship between emotion and engagement. Specifically, we investigate how the six discrete emotions that news visuals deliver, as well as the positiveness of news text, are associated with three engagement activities: sharing, commenting, and reacting. The findings show that users are less likely to share or comment on news posts that convey positive emotions, although they tend to react to such news frequently. The most prominent kind of emotion associated with user engagement activities was “sadness.” We analyzed 12,179 news stories posted on the four major U.S. newspapers’ Facebook pages.


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