Challenges to Transforming Unconventional Social Media Data into Actionable Knowledge for Public Health Systems During Disasters
- 15 October 2019
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness
- Vol. 14 (3), 352-359
- https://doi.org/10.1017/dmp.2019.92
Abstract
Every year, there are larger and more severe disasters and health organizations are struggling to respond with services to keep public health systems running. Making decisions with limited health information can negatively affect response activities and impact morbidity and mortality. An overarching challenge is getting the right health information to the right health service personnel at the right time. As responding agencies engage in social media (eg, Twitter, Facebook) to communicate with the public, new opportunities emerge to leverage this non-traditional information for improved situational awareness. Transforming these big data is dependent on computers to process and filter content for health information categories relevant to health responders. To enable a more health-focused approach to social media analysis during disasters, 2 major research challenges should be addressed: (1) advancing methodologies to extract relevant information for health services and creating dynamic knowledge bases that address both the global and US disaster contexts, and (2) expanding social media research for disaster informatics to focus on health response activities. There is a lack of attention on health-focused social media research beyond epidemiologic surveillance. Future research will require approaches that address challenges of domain-aware, including multilingual language understanding in artificial intelligence for disaster health information extraction. New research will need to focus on the primary goal of health providers, whose priority is to get the right health information to the right medical and public health service personnel at the right time.Keywords
This publication has 32 references indexed in Scilit:
- Emergency-relief coordination on social media: Automatically matching resource requests and offersFirst Monday, 2013
- Lessons from Sandy — Preparing Health Systems for Future DisastersThe New England Journal of Medicine, 2012
- International variations in the clinical, diagnostic, and treatment characteristics of emergency department patients with acute heart failure syndromesEuropean Journal of Heart Failure, 2010
- Post-earthquake Haiti: the critical role for rehabilitation services following a humanitarian crisisDisability and Rehabilitation, 2010
- Providing Continuity of Care for Chronic Diseases in the Aftermath of Katrina: From Field Experience to Policy RecommendationsDisaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, 2009
- The Controversy Inherent in Managing Frail Nursing Home Residents During Complex Hurricane EmergenciesJournal of the American Medical Directors Association, 2008
- Iraq War mortality estimates: A systematic reviewConflict and Health, 2008
- HealthMap: Global Infectious Disease Monitoring through Automated Classification and Visualization of Internet Media ReportsJournal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 2008
- Chronic Disease and Related Conditions at Emergency Treatment Facilities in the New Orleans Area After Hurricane KatrinaDisaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, 2008
- Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample surveyThe Lancet, 2004