Dive Brief:
- The sentiment in ACA-related tweets correlates to state-level enrollment in the health insurance marketplaces, according to researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
- While Twitter has previously been used to glean the public's perception on health topics, this study is the first to examine its correlation to national health insurance marketplace enrollment.
- The study, published online in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, suggests this finding indicates that Twitter can be utilized to gauge real-time public opinion and emerging issues.
Dive Insight:
The study looked at a total of 977,303 tweets about the ACA and "Obamacare," as well as tweets directed to the Twitter accounts of HealthCare.gov and the 17 state-based marketplaces in March 2014. The researchers then scored the sentiment of the tweets using the National Research Council (NRC) sentiment lexicon, which provides words with a "sentiment weight" based on their positivity or negativity. They determined that a 10% increase in the sentiment of tweets was associated with a 9% increase in state-level ACA health insurance enrollment.
The researchers believe Twitter holds the potential to provide real-time monitoring for future enrollment periods, which would allow officials to quickly identify issues and respond as needed.
"Twitter is a powerful tool when it comes to examining trends in health and health policy," senior author Raina M. Merchant, MD, MSHP, director of the Penn Social Media and Health Innovation Lab and assistant professor of Emergency Medicine, said in a prepared statement. "We can see this methodology being used to improve healthcare in real-time as health policy is implemented, in order to stay on top of any issues and adjust accordingly."