Medical Institutions and Twitter: A Novel Tool for Public Communication in Japan

Abstract

Background: Twitter is a free social networking and microblogging service on the Internet. Medical professionals and patients have started to use Twitter in medicine. Twitter use by medical institutions can interactively and efficiently provide public health information and education for laypeople.

Objective: This study examined Twitter usage by medical institutions.

Methods: We reviewed all Japanese user accounts in which the names of medical institutions were described in the user's Twitter profile. We then classified medical institutions' tweets by content.

Results: We extracted 168 accounts for medical institutions with ≥500 followers. The medical specialties of those accounts were dentistry and oral surgery (n=73), dermatology (n=12), cosmetic surgery (n=10), internal medicine (n=10), ophthalmology (n=6), obstetrics and gynecology (n=5), plastic surgery (n=2), and others (n=50). Of these, 21 accounts tweeted medical knowledge and 45 accounts tweeted guidance about medical practice and consultation hours, including advertisements. In the dentistry and oral surgery accounts, individual behavior or thinking was the most frequent (22/71, 31%) content. On the other hand, consultation including advertisements was the most frequent (14/23, 61%) in cosmetic surgery, plastic surgery, and dermatology.

Conclusions: Some medical specialties used Twitter for disseminating medical knowledge or guidance including advertisements. This indicates that Twitter potentially can be used for various purposes by different medical specialties.

Keywords: Web 2.0; advertisement; consultation guidance; medical education; social media.

Figure 1

Year of Twitter registration by 168 medical institutions, showing the number of Twitter registrations from 2009 to 2011 per half year. The first registration was in July 2, 2009. The latest registration was on November 27, 2011.

Figure 2

Number of Twitter accounts in each medical specialty. The medical specialties of general hospitals were included in the specialty accounts and not in “hospitals”.

Figure 3

Number of tweets from medical institutions in Japan from 2012 to 2014 with content on therapeutic radiology (account 1), cosmetic surgery (account 3), and ophthalmology (account 4).

Figure 4

Number of accounts by medical specialty tweeting content categorized as follows: medical knowledge; consultation guidance including advertisements and newsletters from medical institutions; suggestions from patients; links only to homepages, blogs, and others; individual behavior or thinking; and tweets including multiple types of content.