Social media analytics of overactive bladder posts: what do patients know and want to know?

OBJECTIVE: To assess women's knowledge, patient experience, and treatment decision making regarding overactive bladder (OAB) using digital ethnography. METHODS: Online posts were identified using a data mining service. Two hundred randomized posts were reviewed and coded using grounded theory. We then applied a latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) probabilistic topic modeling process to review the entire collection of identified posts. RESULTS: A total of 2618 posts by 1867 unique users from 203 different websites were identified. Our analysis yielded six themes: the impact of OAB on quality of life, patient-physician interactions, online engagement, symptom management, patient knowledge acquisition, and alternative therapies. CONCLUSION: Overall, online communities are a source of support for women to self-manage the OAB symptom complex and help overcome treatment pathway challenges. Digital ethnography provides insight into patient knowledge and barriers to patient-centered care, which are important to improve patient outreach. Additionally, we identify similar findings to prior work, indicating the reliability of studying social media.