The number of doctors, nurses, pharmacists and consultants that use Twitter now exceeds 75,000 according to new research by Creation Healthcare.

The London-based research and training consultancy tracks public social media use by healthcare professionals (HCPs) through a combination of their online behaviours and publicly available profile information, as well as a manual review process.

A company spokesman told PMLiVE that the HCPs it has identified currently post around 152,000 tweets a day between them.

“We know from our research that HCPs discuss subjects including healthcare policy, research, individual medicines and treatments for diseases, as well as therapy areas in public online social media,” the spokesman added.

2008 seems to have been a pivotal year for HCPs on the social network, with that year seeing their use of Twitter rise more than 500 per cent, up from fewer than 5,000 HCPs in January 2008 to over 27,000 by the end of the year. Since then professional bodies have gradually caught up and, in the UK for example, issued social media guidance for doctors, nurses and pharmacists.

The research also found that the US is home to the highest percentage of HCPs who use Twitter (31 per cent of the worldwide total), followed by the UK (9 per cent). Unsurprisingly the most common language used by HCPs on Twitter is English (72 per cent of whom use it in posts to their public profiles), followed by Spanish (14 per cent) and then Japanese (five per cent).

Creation Healthcare's CEO Daniel Ghinn said: “Public social media, including Twitter is changing the way that healthcare professionals are learning and collaborating professionally.” 

Data from the study, which is based on the consultancy's Creation Pinpoint HCP social media monitoring tool, shows the growth in HCP use of Twitter over the last eight years and is visualised above. The study also found that when Twitter began in 2006 just 23 healthcare professionals had signed up to the platform and that the first three recognised by Creation Pinpoint were based in Scotland, the US and Canada.

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