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.