Measuring the Influence of Commercial Entities in the Twitter
backchannels of medical conferences: The #MICEproject
Abstract
Twitter backchannels are increasingly popular at medical conferences. A
variety of user groups, including healthcare providers and third party
entities (e.g., pharmaceutical or medical device companies) use these
backchannels to communicate with one another. These backchannels are
unregulated and can allow third party commercial entities to exert an
equal or greater amount of influence than healthcare providers. Third
parties can use this influence to promote their products or services
instead of sharing unbiased, evidence-based information. In the
#MICEproject we quantified the influence that third party commercial
entities had in 13 major medical conferences.