2014.ISDS.Abstracts.Final.pdf


ISDS Annual Conference Proceedings 2014. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-
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ISDS 2014 Conference Abstracts

Now Trending in Your Community: Social Media Insights 
For Your Public Health Mission

Diana M. Kushner*

Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, DC, USA

Objective
The goal of the Now Trending website is to provide a web based 

tool that pulls out relevant Twitter conversations concerning illness 
and disasters and provides meaningful analytics on how those 
conversations are trending. The website gives the user the ability to 
view trends overall and for specific geographic areas.

Introduction
In today’s fast paced world, information is available (and expected) 

instantaneously. Social media has only fueled this expectation as it has 
permeated all aspects of our lives. More and more of the population 
is turning to social media outlets to share their thoughts and update 
their status, especially during disasters. With all these conversations 
occurring, it is only reasonable to assume that health status is part 
of the information being shared. In fact, studies by Johns Hopkins 
University1 and Harvard University2 have shown that social media 
reporting can serve as an early indicator and warning of emerging 
health issues within a community. Whether people are talking about 
being sick themselves or fear of illness in the community, there is a 
wealth of knowledge to be gained by tapping into this information. 
Yet gaining insight and understanding from social media data can 
be problematic. The unstructured nature of the data, the presence of 
social media “spam”, and the frequency of reposting information 
makes social media a noisy data source. Being able to harness this 
data would provide the opportunity to use social media as an effective 
situational awareness and early warning tool for biosurveillance 
missions. But how do you accomplish this? There are tens of millions 
of conversations happening on social media every day that would 
need to be sifted through to get to the health related topics. No public 
health entity has the time or staffing for that endeavor.

Methods
Utilizing an innovation challenge, the Assistant Secretary for 

Preparedness and Response (ASPR) within the Department of 
Health and Human Services held a competition to create a web-based 
application that would provide federal, state, and local public health 
authorities the ability to cut through the vast amounts of Twitter data 
and pull out relevant conversations on illness for the national level 
as well as their geographic area of interest. This information is then 
available to use in multiple ways such as serving as an indicator of 
potential health issues emerging in the population, building a baseline 
of trend data, engaging the public on trending health topics, or cross-
referencing other data sources. Working with the winning team, ASPR 
transitioned the winning website over to government cloud space to 
provide consistent and reliable tool for its public health partners. This 
website, https://nowtrending.hhs.gov, is available free of charge to not 
only public health practitioners, but all interested parties.

Results
The Now Trending application is a web-based tool which allows 

users to review trends in discussions of illness and disaster related 
topics on Twitter in real time. Users of Now Trending have the ability 
to view analytics of Twitter trends by geographic area or by health 
condition. The analytics are shown as time period trends which range 

from the previous 2 hours to the previous week. Users can click on 
points in the graph to see the actual tweets that make up the trends in 
order to gain better context of the Twitter conversations.

Now Trending cuts through the noise in Twitter by filtering health 
condition searches using a list of terms for each health condition, 
including the common terms used by the general population and some 
of the common symptoms associated with the condition. In addition, 
Now Trending uses qualifier terms to further eliminate irrelevant 
Tweets. There are currently 27 health conditions tracked by Now 
Trending, but this can be easily expanded to include terms that are 
relevant to current events.

Conclusions
The Now Trending website is being presented to ensure all public 

health personnel are aware of this free tool and the advantages it can 
provide them in their public health missions.

Keywords
Social Media; Biosurveillance; Geolocation

References

[1] Paul, Michael and Dredze, Mark. You Are What You Tweet: Analyzing 
Twitter for Public Health. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2011.

[2] Keller, Mikaela, et al. “Use od Unstructured Event-Based Reports for 
Global Infectious Disease Surveillance.” Emerging Infectious Disease 
15, no. 5 (May 2009): 689-695.

*Diana M. Kushner

E-mail: diana.kushner@hhs.gov    

Online Journal of Public Health Informatics * ISSN 1947-2579 * http://ojphi.org * (1):e140, 201