Katherine J. Sullivan1,*, Marisha Burden2, Angela Keniston2, Juan M. Banda3, Lawrence E. Hunter4
1Data Science to Patient Value, University of Colorado School of Medicine
2Division of Hospital Medicine, University of Colorado School of Medicine
3Department of Computer Science, Georgia State University
4Computational Bioscience Program, University of Colorado School of Medicine
*Corresponding author
Email: Katherine.Sullivan@CUAnschutz.edu, marisha.burden@cuanschutz.edu, Angela.Keniston@cuanschutz.edu, jbanda@gsu.edu, Larry.Hunter@CUAnschutz.edu
Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing 26:95-106(2021)
© 2021 World Scientific
Open Access chapter published by World Scientific Publishing Company and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 License.
Physicians' beliefs and attitudes about COVID-19 are important to ascertain because of their central role in providing care to patients during the pandemic. Identifying topics and sentiments discussed by physicians and other healthcare workers can lead to identification of gaps relating to the COVID-19 pandemic response within the healthcare system. To better understand physicians' perspectives on the COVID-19 response, we extracted Twitter data from a specific user group that allows physicians to stay anonymous while expressing their perspectives about the COVID-19 pandemic. All tweets were in English. We measured most frequent bigrams and trigrams, compared sentiment analysis methods, and compared our findings to a larger Twitter dataset containing general COVID-19 related discourse. We found significant differences between the two datasets for specific topical phrases. No statistically significant difference was found in sentiments between the two datasets, and both trended slightly more positive than negative. Upon comparison to manual sentiment analysis, it was determined that these sentiment analysis methods should be improved to accurately capture sentiments of anonymous physician data. Anonymous physician social media data is a unique source of information that provides important insights into COVID-19 perspectives.