MD Magazine, March 22, 2018
Physicians can navigate the maze of communities and conversations on Twitter using Symplur’s Healthcare Hashtag Project, a free service that lists which conferences or diseases, for instance, are being tweeted about the most at that moment. Symplur also sells access to analytics of its enormous database. In 2016, a group of physicians used Symplur to study 300 tweets by medical professionals discussing primary-care issues, and found that the average tweet was written at a reading level between the ninth and tenth grade. The National Institutes of Health recommends that medical literature for patients stay within a seventh or eighth grade reading level, yet material is consistently too complex. It’s a rare case where Twitter’s dumbing-down of discourse appears to be serving the public good.
— MD Magazine
