Keynote talk by Dr. Sudha Ram at the BIG Data SUMMIT, July 31, 2012.

1. The Emerging Role of Social Media
Analytics in Health Care and Medicine
Dr. Sudha Ram
Director, INSITE Center for Business Intelligence and Analytics
McClelland Professor of MIS and Computer Science
Member, BIO5 and IE
Eller College of Management
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
Email: ram@eller.arizona.edu
INSITE: www.insiteua.org
July 31, 2012

2. Web: Limitless Possibilities
• Treasure Trove of Big Data, Dynamic
Content, Hard Problems
• Volume, Velocity, Variety of Data
• Unstructured Data, Timestamped,
location based
• Predictive Analytics and Data Mining to
the Rescue

3. Web – Interaction Networks
Model as an Interaction Network

4. Network of Interactions
• Explicit Networks: Followers and Following
on Twitter, Friendships on Facebook,
LinkedIn Professional Network
But….. More interesting….
• Implicit Networks: Based on Interactions on
forums, FB Pages, Wikipedia, Yelp,
Foursquare….
• These hidden networks can reveal a lot of
interesting patterns.
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5. Implicit Interaction Network

6. Implicit Interactions
• Wikipedia: Edits and Collaborations on
an article, across articles, on a topic…
• Facebook: Posts and comments
• Twitter: Tweets, replies, retweets
• Blogs: Comments and responses
• Forums: Threads, responses
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8. Media News Diffusion
Networks
Timeline – 3 months
September – November 2011

10. BBC
Network

11. Nytimes

12. Leveraging Social Media
• Health care
• Biomedical Research
• Personalized Medicine
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13. Online Healthcare Communities
• Patients Like Me
• CureTogether
• MedHelp
• 23andMe
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14. OHCs
• Individuals sharing Information
• Diseases, Treatments, Symptoms, disease
progression, blood tests and results,
demographics,
• Large Populations of cases and controls
• Rapidly producing clinical research results
• PLM – 150,000+ individuals, MedHelp: 12
million+ users
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15. OHC Examples
• ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) and
Lithium Treatment (PLM, 2011)
• Parkinson’s Disease – 2 novel genes
Genotyping services, phenotyping
information gathered online (23andMe,
2011)
• Multifocal lens implant failures
(MedHelp)
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16. Other examples
• MyHeartMap: Crowdsourcing to located
AEDs in Philadelphia
• RxAnte: Medication Adherence and
Intervention Design
• Genomera: Socially designed health care
studies
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17. Benefits of Using Social Media
• Accelerate the pace of research
• Recruitment of subjects for clinical trials
• Replicate GWAS quickly and reliably
• Answer Community generated questions
• Live experiments
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18. INSITE Center
• Collect data, structure and clean it to create
datasets
• Build tractable models and algorithms for
detecting patterns and further our
understanding
• Observe structures not visible on a smaller
scale
• Live Analytics and Real Time Business
Intelligence

19. Conclusion
• Free the Data
• Link Social Media generated Data with
Transactional data
• Discovery Driven Approach
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20. Discussion
Thank you!

Questions/Comments??
ram@eller.arizona.edu
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