Saving lives using social media: Analysis of the role of twitter for personal blood donation requests and dissemination

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Social media has an impact on many aspects of human life ranging from sharing personal information to revolutionizing political systems of entire countries. One not so well studied aspect of social media is analyzing its usage and efficacy in healthcare, particularly in developing countries which lack state-of-the-art healthcare systems and processes. In such countries, social media may be used to facilitate patient-centric healthcare by involving the patient for fulfilling personal healthcare needs. This article provides an in-depth analysis of one such need, that is, how people use social media to request for blood donations. We study the request and dissemination behavior of people using social media to fulfill blood donation requests. We focus on twitter, and blood donation accounts in India. Our study reveals that each of the seven twitter accounts we studied have a large followership of more than 35,000 users on an average and receive a substantial number (more than 900) of donation requests in a day on an average. We analyze the requests in various ways to present an outlook for healthcare providers to make their systems more patient-centric through a better understanding of the needs of people requesting for blood donations. Our study also identifies areas where future social media enabled automated healthcare systems can focus on the needs of individual patients. These systems can provide support for saving more lives by reducing the gap between blood donors and the people in need.