Social listening in healthcare: is it irresponsible?

There’s a quietly emerging niche in the healthcare industry: social listening for marketable data. But is it moral? And is it safe?

Online firms are now popping up slowly but surely, selling packaged snippets of tweets, posts and comments from the health-conscious public at large. These bundles of ‘market data’ are already being sold to manufacturers, hospitals and healthcare providers, with the intention of informing anything from purchasing decisions, strategies, formulations and more.

Social listening in the wider context is nothing new. It’s commonly used in targeted advertising online, and has sparked considerable controversy in recent years – and when we’re talking healthcare, for most a very personal thing, it becomes a morally grey area.

Morals qualms aside, I wonder if it’s responsible to sell data collected based on human patterns of online behaviour. Firms currently offering these services include Treato, Signals and PatientsLikeMe – which is a forum for the public to share symptoms and treatments, and the website explains “we take the information you entrust to us and sell it to the companies that can use that data to improve or understand products or the disease market”.

These websites all use strict algorithms to filter through to the most valuable – and informative – core data. But, to be quite blunt, in comparison to algorithms, humans are illogical and emotionally-driven. So online behaviour needs to be treated with caution, no matter how many filters and checks it goes through before it reaches the buyer.

No doubt at some point in recent years, you’ve been caught off-guard by an advert which has some significance to your personal life, but is promoting a product which is completely wrong for you. In digital marketing, this is a common problem – the algorithms for creating ‘targetted campaigns’ are not perfect – they often fail to feed the right products to the right people. And if you apply this to the pharma supply chain, it gets really dangerous.

So it all comes back to product marketing. It’s well-known that the pharma and healthcare industries still struggle with the weight of dominant forces and big budget campaigning for ‘fashionable’ treatments. If these are the only brands that filter back to the digitally conversing public, and the healthcare sector buys their opinion back as ‘data’, we run the risk of creating a very vicious cycle.