For the study, researchers examined 977,303 tweets related to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and “Obamacare” as well as tweets directed at the Twitter handle for HealthCare.gov and the 17 state-based marketplace Twitter accounts. The researchers then tested a correlation of the positivity or negativity of the tweets with marketplace enrollment by state.
The researchers found a significant correlation between Twitter sentiment and marketplace enrollment.
“The correlation between Twitter sentiment and the number of eligible individual who enrolled in a marketplace plan highlights the potential for Twitter to be a real-time monitoring strategy for future enrollment periods,” said Charlene A. Wong, MD, one of the study’s authors.
The study was conducted in March 2014 and published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.
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