Anticoagulation
A study of patient understanding of anticoagulation in social media
Patient Social Intelligence Report: Series 1, Issue 2
October 15, 2010
Anticoagulation treatment remains complex even as treatment options have been available for over 60 years.
The patterns in social media conversations suggest that patients believe that they must educate themselves, each other and even, at times, their physicians. We see that the self-education effort has increased from 1999 until today. INR testing and awareness is low and seems to be a gap in patient self-education as well as drug interactions (beyond antiplaque treatment) and dosing. Life-long treatment is questioned in later years. Food and natural supplements are believed by some to be able to replace or reduce the need for life-long treatment.
Physicians do not always agree on treatment course and therefore, that may contribute to patients feeling that they need to be more in control of what happens to them both during and after treatment. Physician dissent is true even in 2010.
The purpose of this study was to evaluate patient understanding of anticoagulation and their treatment regimen.
Our goal for each study within our Patient Social Intelligence series is to provide insight into what patients and consumers are freely and openly sharing about their experiences on a wide and varying array of current healthcare topics.
This study was conducted by Wool Labs on its own and was not sponsored or paid for in any way. Wool Labs does publish client-sponsored studies.
Wool Labs used our social cognition business intelligence system, WebDig, amplified by our pharmaceutical expert analysis, to develop this report.
WebDig uses the entire Internet to find conversations on any subject - industries, companies, brands and/or specific topics. The combined use of our advanced website screening, natural language processor, sentiment algorithms, extensive data processing capabilities, and targeted human intervention eliminates all off-topic comments and spam to isolate the most meaningful conversations about a subject. And since we scour the entire Internet, we retrieve everything regardless of where and when it was posted—even in places that go undetected by the major search engines and other commercial tools.
As a pioneer and leader in social cognition systems, we have conducted hundreds of studies. We have been advancing our systems since 2007 and have applied our software across the Internet as well as within TV and radio.
For this Dig, we analyzed 5,071 conversations on Anticoagulation and the stated topics that were posted from May 3, 1999 to September 27, 2010 across all blogs, user forums, and message boards on the Internet.