Computing Veracity – the Fourth Challenge of Big Data

Requirements of the Healthcare Use Case

by Anna Kolliakou (King’s College London)

We spent the first six months of the project on the development of four demonstration studies to monitor and inter-link social media and patient records. The aim is to define the structure for testing the utility of PHEME as a primary source of data and in combination with electronic patient records through the CRIS system– the tool used to extract anonymised data from clinical records.

Our first demonstration study on social media and healthcare choices will focus on the effects discussions about controversial medications and treatments might have on the presentation of clinical populations and clinicians’ prescribing practices. The monitoring of controversial novel psychoactive substances in social media and their appearance in clinical records is the focus of the second study. The development of the study on social media and stigma aims to address the vulnerability of particular clinical groups to the peaks of stigmatising chatter on social media platforms. Lastly, our final demonstration study will seek to explore whether social media might influence young people at risk of self-harming behaviour and suicide.

Data extraction from patient and physician blogs and forums as well as Twitter using queries containing keywords and hashtags will be carried out. A system to monitor news stories relating to the demonstration studies will be developed. Another essential requirement will be to connect social media occurrences to clinical records by enabling the easy integration of the PHEME rumour intelligence algorithms with the CRIS system analysis infrastructure. All applications written to process CRIS records within PHEME will be required to operate within the CRIS GATE interface.The PHEME veracity intelligence tools and visual dashboard will support the identification and quality assessment of the mis/disinformation source, detection of new trends and sentiment on the topics of interest and cross-referencing to news stories.

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