Opportunity   

For individuals with chronic illnesses, automated self-management support and online communities have been shown to improve clinical outcomes, increase patient satisfaction, and reduce health care costs and utilization. 

Intervention  

We designed a randomized controlled trial to assess the effects of tweeting and retweeting cardiovascular health content among individuals with poorly controlled hypertension.  

Participants in the intervention arm were asked to tweet health content twice a week using a specific hashtag for six months. Blood pressure (BP) readings were collected from participants via photo submission, in person, or through electronic health records. 

Impact  

After six months, we did not observe improvement in systolic BP or patient activation measures in the intervention group. However, the study did demonstrate that remote recruitment and clinical outcome collection are feasible using Twitter. This finding could inform future studies that seek to leverage online interventions to foster behavior change.