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Measuring the Influence of Commercial Entities in the Twitter backchannels of medical conferences: The #MICEproject
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  • Tejas Desai (@nephondemand),
  • Parteek Singla,
  • Swapnil Kachare,
  • Zoheb Syed,
  • Deeba Minhas
Tejas Desai (@nephondemand)
Nephrology On-Demand, Online @ http://goo.gl/tfSAQT

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Parteek Singla
Barnes Jewish Hospital, St. Louis, Missouri
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Swapnil Kachare
East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina
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Zoheb Syed
College of William and Mary, Yorktown, Virginia
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Deeba Minhas
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, California
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Abstract

Twitter backchannels are increasingly popular at medical conferences.  A variety of user groups, including healthcare providers and third party entities (e.g., pharmaceutical or medical device companies) use these backchannels to communicate with one another.  These backchannels are unregulated and can allow third party commercial entities to exert an equal or greater amount of influence than healthcare providers.  Third parties can use this influence to promote their products or services instead of sharing unbiased, evidence-based information.  In the #MICEproject we quantified the influence that third party commercial entities had in 13 major medical conferences.