The DFW Hospital Council (DFWHC) Foundation’s hospital data was combined with an analysis of real-time Twitter data to project population-level asthma ED visits and hospital admissions, according to a study presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies Meeting last week in Baltimore.

Researchers used Twitter location data to isolate tweets from the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and only included asthma-relevant tweets in their analysis. Using linear regression analyses, they evaluated the chronological association between the number of asthma-relevant tweets and asthma ED visits/admissions data from the DFWHC Foundation, a network of more than 80 North Texas hospitals.

“Our research is innovative and unique because it harnesses the power of Big Data from social media and other sources to address the problem of anticipating ED visits for a chronic condition, in this case asthma, in close to real-time conditions,” said study investigator Sudha Ram, PhD, director of the INSITE Center for Business Intelligence and Analytics at the University of Arizona.

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