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Asthma-related Twitter posts could aid hospital preparation for emergency asthma visits

BALTIMORE — Daniel M. Fein, MD, from the Division of Pediatric Emergency Medicine of Children's Hospital at Montefiore and assistant professor of pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, discussed how asthma-related tweets could help predict asthma-related emergency department visits or hospitalizations.

“The authors were able to show that for a rise in Tweets about asthma, there was an increase in ED visits for asthma-related symptoms,” Fein said. “This is fascinating, not only because it can provide emergency medicine physicians ways to think about how we can use this to our advantage in terms of staffing, predicting what will happen not only for exacerbations of chronic conditions like asthma, but also the flu or outbreaks of norovirus and gastrointestinal symptoms.”