San Diegos Swarmology Mines Online Conversations for Health Data

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Swarmology’s customers already include a large healthcare insurance provider and a couple of smaller pharmaceutical companies, Bohm says.By working with “very rich data,” Bohm says he helped pharmaceuticals optimize the design of their clinical trials—in part by identifying the ideal medical center, and by mapping and recruiting patients for a particular study.Bohm says the idea for Swarmology occurred after he began wondering if there was a comparable richness in the health and medical information that people share on Facebook and Twitter.For example, he says Facebook users will update their status with such comments as “My daughter had another asthma attack today” or “I’m taking Sumatriptan [for a migraine] and it’s not working.” Bohm says a Pew internet Life Research study published earlier this year shows that 70 percent of U.S. adults search online for health-related subjects, and some 43 percent are crowdsourcing their health care through online discussions with fellow patients and healthcare providers.We can capture all the conversations—we call that a swarm—in a virtual community.” While Swarmology’s technology is proprietary, Bohm says the Centers for Disease Control and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Projects Agency are using similar techniques to analyze social media “to try to understand if the online signals are sufficient to predict political unrest in other countries or to track and predict where flu and allergy outbreaks are going to stress regional healthcare systems.

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