Penn Medicine launches Center for Digital Health

Penn Medicine - Dr. Raina Merchant

Researchers and physicians at Penn Medicine — led by Raina Merchant, MD, MSHP — are mining social media posts, tweets, Instagram photos and Yelp reviews for clues to find what ails today’s men and women.

Merchant has been named an Associate Vice President for the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Director of the newly created Penn Medicine Center for Digital Health.

“Connectivity and innovation are central elements of Penn Medicine’s strategic plan, and a large and increasing proportion of our patients engage with the world digitally,” Ralph W. Muller, CEO of the University of Pennsylvania Health System, said in a statement. “Dr. Merchant’s visionary research is harnessing the power of this engagement to transform the way we deliver health care.”

Merchant has been leading Penn Medicine’s Social Media Laboratory, which is now the Center for Digital Health, since 2013 during which she cultivated partnerships from across the university — with Wharton, Annenberg, and the School of Engineering and Applied Science — to map a strategy and process to systematically evaluate how social media platforms can affect health. Ultimately, the goal is to develop new ways for clinicians to improve care delivery through these [social media] channels.

This research Merchant describes as probing “the social mediome” — a way of collectively describing people or groups based on their digital data merged with their health record data. So far, her work has demonstrated the value of mining Yelp reviews for information about patients’ experiences in hospitals, mapped ways in which social media may be harnessed for emergency preparedness and response, and shown that information donated by patients from their Facebook accounts may be paired with their electronic medical records to yield new insights about their health. New areas of research for the Center for Digital Health include identification of factors linked to depression and obesity, and studying social media to trace language changes that may be associated with Alzheimer’s or other types of cognitive decline.

We not sure when the first results of Penn’s Center for Digital Health research will be released but we’ll make sure you get them as soon as they’re published. Stay tuned…