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Hubs and Authorities in Medical Conferences

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5579322/

 

This article is about analyzing the effect of including patients in healthcare conferences.  Often, only people like doctors and other industry experts were invited to such conferences, and this paper is about having patients attend and engaging them increases the impact of the conference.  The researchers looked at tweets to see how the information presented at the conference was dispersed and found that even with a relatively small number of patients, the content of the conference spreads to a significantly larger audience and there are generally more conversations about the speakers.  The researchers categorized people that attended these types of conferences into patients, physicians and researchers, journalists and pharmaceutical organizations, among other distinctions, and tried to study the social network created by these people in a conference about health care.  The results were interesting because patients, in general, do not have information about healthcare that would enhance the informational value of such a conference and despite the benefits patients receive from discussions about health care, they’re usually not that interested in the technicalities of medicine.  However, even though they do not add information, they can increase the impact of certain discussions by providing credibility to the speakers and acting as a link between healthcare professionals and the outside world.

One way in which this article relates to concepts we covered is that helps show why we use hubs and authorities analysis.  The researchers looked at patients as hubs and groups of people like physicians as authorities.  This is similar to looking at websites that link to a lot of reputable websites as hubs, because like websites with links to say famous newspapers, patients who liked and talked about famous presenters at the conference give those presenters more credibility.  The researchers used the connections between patients and healthcare professionals found through twitter to calculate hub scores and authority scores, which reinforced the fact that while the patients were not authorities, they played an important role in determining what information was disseminated to the public.  This helps explain why search engines can benefit from a system of ranking websites based on their “hub” and “authority” scores. This article also relates to our study of the structure of social networks.  The reason patients could help distribute information to people more effectively than medical professionals is that the medical community is strongly connected within themselves, so they know most of the same people, while patients, being more weekly connected to medical professionals, form local bridges between people who regularly attend conferences and people who don’t, thereby increasing the eventual scope of information presented at the conference.

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