Recent Findings from University of Pennsylvania Provides New Insights into Health Policy (Twitter Accounts Followed by Congressional Health Staff)

By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Weekly News -- Fresh data on Health Policy are presented in a new report. According to news reporting from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by VerticalNews journalists, research stated, "Although health policy research should inform policy making, the communication gap between researchers and policy makers limits successful translation. Social media represents a new opportunity to connect researchers and policy makers."

The news correspondents obtained a quote from the research from the University of Pennsylvania, "Our objective was to assess who Congressional health policy staff follow on a major social media platform. Cross-sectional study. Our study measured Congressional health policy staff's use of Twitter and the types of individuals and organizations they follow. To focus on more influential Twitter accounts, we restricted our sample to those followed by at least 3 individual Congressional staff members. Of the 30,843 accounts followed by the 115 Congressional health policy staff, 1273 were potentially policy-related and followed by 3 or more staff. Of these, few were academically affiliated (2.4%) or explicitly health-related (5.6%) sites; many were general news media sources (50.9%) and political and governmental sources (36.4%). Health-focused accounts were frequently connected to the news media or government rather than academia. Top accounts followed (ie, highest quintile) were most likely to be national news organizations (odds ratio [OR], 5.88; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.75-19.7) and elected officials (OR, 8.22; 95% CI, 1.75-38.6) compared with advocacy and interest groups. Health-related and academic sources are largely absent from the Twitter conversations with US Congressional health policy staff."

According to the news reporters, the research concluded: "Even within social media, traditional and political news media are important information intermediaries that researchers and journals should target to disseminate health policy evidence."

For more information on this research see: Twitter Accounts Followed by Congressional Health Staff. American Journal of Managed Care, 2017;23(7):E238-E244. American Journal of Managed Care can be contacted at: Managed Care & Healthcare Communications Llc, 666 Plainsboro Rd, Ste 300, Plainsboro, NJ 08536, USA.

Our news journalists report that additional information may be obtained by contacting D. Grande, University of Pennsylvania, Leonard Davis Inst Hlth Econ, Philadelphia, PA 19104, United States. Additional authors for this research include Z.F. Meisel, R.M. Merchant, J. Seymour and S.E. Gollust.

Keywords for this news article include: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, North and Central America, Health Policy, Legislation, University of Pennsylvania.

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