Impacts of biomedical hashtag-based Twitter campaign: #DHPSP utilization for promotion of open innovation in digital health, patient safety, and personalized medicine

The open innovation hub Digital Health and Patient Safety Platform (DHPSP) was recently established with the
\npurpose to invigorate collaborative scientific research and the development of new digital products and personalized
\nsolutions aiming to improve human health and patient safety. In this study, we evaluated the effectiveness
\nof a Twitter‐based campaign centered on using the hashtag #DHPSP to promote the visibility of the
\nDHPSP initiative. Thus, tweets containing #DHPSP were monitored for five weeks for the period
\n20.10.2020–24.11.2020 and were analyzed with Symplur Signals (social media analytics tool). In the study
\nperiod, a total of 11,005 tweets containing #DHPSP were posted by 3020 Twitter users, generating
\n151,984,378 impressions. Analysis of the healthcare stakeholder‐identity of the Twitter users who used
\n#DHPSP revealed that the most of participating user accounts belonged to individuals or doctors, with the
\ntop three user locations being the United States (501 users), the United Kingdom (155 users), and India
\n(121 users). Analysis of co‐occurring hashtags and the full text of the posted tweets further revealed that
\nthe major themes of attention in the #DHPSP Twitter‐community were related to the coronavirus disease
\n2019 (COVID‐19), medicine and health, digital health technologies, and science communication in general.
\nOverall, these results indicate that the #DHPSP initiative achieved high visibility and engaged a large
\nbody of Twitter users interested in the DHPSP focus area. Moreover, the conducted campaign resulted in an
\nincrease of DHPSP member enrollments and website visitors, and new scientific collaborations were formed.
\nThus, Twitter campaigns centered on a dedicated hashtag prove to be a highly efficient tool for visibilitypromotion,
\nwhich could be successfully utilized by healthcare‐related open innovation platforms or initiatives.