The Purpose of the Healthcare Social Graph Score

Healthcare social media stakeholders need an objective and trustworthy way to measure their impact. Patient advocates applying for speaker slots at healthcare conferences need a way to demonstrate the impact of their work in social media. For physicians and other clinicians, social media now plays a growing role in scholarship, education, information dissemination, and career advancement. Their CVs need to impartially reflect the outcomes of their public social media output. For such a measurement, or score, to be objective and trustworthy, it needs to reach beyond the elusive concept of “influence,” it must reflect each stakeholder’s output as it relates to healthcare only, and it must avoid any metrics that are easily manipulated.

Scientific Work on Healthcare Social Graph Score

The following published journal articles have studied the Healthcare Social Graph Score:

Evaluating Scholars’ Impact and Influence: Cross-sectional Study of the Correlation Between a Novel Social Media–Based Score and an Author-Level Citation Metric
Oliveira J E Silva, L., Maldonado, G., Brigham, T., Mullan, A. F., Utengen, A., & Cabrera, D. (2021). Evaluating Scholars' Impact and Influence: Cross-sectional Study of the Correlation Between a Novel Social Media-Based Score and an Author-Level Citation Metric. Journal of medical Internet research, 23(5), e28859. https://doi.org/10.2196/28859

The importance of social media to the academic surgical literature: Relationship between Twitter activity and readership metrics
Mobarak, S., Stott, M. C., Lee, W. J., Davé, M. S., Tarazi, M., & Macutkiewicz, C. (2021). The importance of social media to the academic surgical literature: Relationship between Twitter activity and readership metrics. Surgery, 170(3), 650–656. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.surg.2021.01.003

The Implementation and Effectiveness of PathElective.com
Lilley, C. M., Arnold, C. A., Arnold, M., Booth, A. L., Gardner, J. M., Jiang, X. S., Loghavi, S., & Mirza, K. M. (2021). The Implementation and Effectiveness of PathElective.com. Academic pathology, 8, 23742895211006829. https://doi.org/10.1177/23742895211006829

Clinical Neurophysiology and Social Media: Time to Take the Plunge!
Ganesan, Saptharishi L.*,†,‡; Husain, Aatif M.§,‖ Clinical Neurophysiology and Social Media: Time to Take the Plunge!, Journal of Clinical Neurophysiology: November 2021 - Volume 38 - Issue 6 - p 467-469 doi: 10.1097/WNP.0000000000000903

Methodology

Symplur tracks over 35,000 healthcare topics in real-time on Twitter. Billions of data points are analyzed every week to create weekly top impact profile lists for the past year for each of the 35,000 topics tracked. The rankings are created using the impact algorithm SymplurRank. In addition to these rankings, Symplur also measures the quality of the conversations for every topic each week. This conversation quality score is then factored with conversation volume to provide a weighted measure for the impact scores. Finally, the 52 weekly rankings and quality scores are combined into a single number for each social media profile and then normalized on a scale of 0 to 100. This final number is known as the Healthcare Social Graph Score.

Collaborators

The Healthcare Social Graph Score was developed with insights from several organizations and individuals. Stanford Medicine X provided foundational guidance with the principles of Everyone Included™ engineered deep into the algorithms used in computing the Healthcare Social Graph Score. Mayo Clinic Social Media Network provided invaluable insights from their diverse use cases for the Healthcare Social Graph Score ranging from its usefulness for individual academics and physicians, to recruiters and employers. Keep an eye out for a future global CME class from Mayo Clinic on how to become an academic social media influencer.

How can I improve my score?

The Healthcare Social Graph Score is earned from the impact you make in the healthcare conversations you engage in. Neither how much you tweet nor your follower count have any impact on your score. The entirety of the score is a result of how others engage with your output. If you receive engagement from others on a healthcare topic, that is positive. If you receive engagement from others known to be influential on that topic, that is even more positive. It also matters who you receive engagement from and what stakeholder group they belong to. For example, if you receive engagement from known doctors or patient advocates, that is very positive. On the other hand, if you receive engagement from profiles that normally do not participate in healthcare conversations, that is largely discounted.