Location
Hilton Hawaiian Village, Honolulu, Hawaii
Event Website
https://hicss.hawaii.edu/
Start Date
3-1-2024 12:00 AM
End Date
6-1-2024 12:00 AM
Description
Social media is playing a critical role in disseminating health information, and anecdotal evidence suggests it is influencing the perceptions of healthcare providers. To understand the influence of social media on healthcare providers' clinical decisions, we examine the influence of Twitter discourse regarding Hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19 patients on the proportion of hydroxychloroquine prescriptions prescribed for COVID-19 patients in the USA in 2020. We collected Twitter data from Twitter API v2 and Hydroxychloroquine prescriptions in the USA from Symphony Health data on the COVID-19 research database. Econometric analysis of our data indicates that Twitter discourse has a positive influence on the hydroxychloroquine prescriptions prescribed in the USA in 2020. Our results are robust to time-invariant location-specific metrics. We discuss the possible pathways through which Twitter could have influenced healthcare providers' prescribing decisions.
Recommended Citation
Gorthi, Sai Soundarya; Ganju, Kartik; and Pinsonneault, Alain, "Influence of Twitter on Medication Prescriptions" (2024). Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2024 (HICSS-57). 9.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/hicss-57/hc/social_media/9
Influence of Twitter on Medication Prescriptions
Hilton Hawaiian Village, Honolulu, Hawaii
Social media is playing a critical role in disseminating health information, and anecdotal evidence suggests it is influencing the perceptions of healthcare providers. To understand the influence of social media on healthcare providers' clinical decisions, we examine the influence of Twitter discourse regarding Hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19 patients on the proportion of hydroxychloroquine prescriptions prescribed for COVID-19 patients in the USA in 2020. We collected Twitter data from Twitter API v2 and Hydroxychloroquine prescriptions in the USA from Symphony Health data on the COVID-19 research database. Econometric analysis of our data indicates that Twitter discourse has a positive influence on the hydroxychloroquine prescriptions prescribed in the USA in 2020. Our results are robust to time-invariant location-specific metrics. We discuss the possible pathways through which Twitter could have influenced healthcare providers' prescribing decisions.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/hicss-57/hc/social_media/9