Developing an app to alert health care pros to misinformation on social media
16 Dec 2022
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Source: PRNewswire
(PRNewsfoto/OSF HealthCare)
Jump ARCHES grant provides $100,000 toward research and development
PEORIA, Ill. and URBANA, Ill., Dec. 16, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- University of Illinois sociology professor Kevin Leicht, PhD, recalls a time during the COVID-19 pandemic when during a conversation, someone insisted only six people had died from the highly-infectious and rapidly-circulating virus. It was clear disinformation was driving people to doubt the potential deadly nature of the virus.
But even before the pandemic, researchers at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) had begun work on researching the spread of medical misinformation. Leicht, who is also science team lead at the Chicago-based Discovery Partners Institute (DPI), is co-leading work funded by DPI and a more than $100,000 Jump ARCHES newly-awarded grant to develop a software application for health care professionals to receive real-time alerts about misinformation on social media. The project builds on misinformation research and past National Science Foundation and Jump ARCHES-funded efforts to identify the spread of misinformation about COVID-19 and other debunked medical research.
Jump ARCHES (Applied Research for Community Health Through Engineering and Simulation) twice a year funds joint research and development projects as part of an academic incubator with the University of Illinois and this latest project was among nearly $1.8 million in grants going to 16 projects.
Leicht says he and fellow researchers were a bit surprised there wasn't a more robust and commercially-available software platform to identify medical and health misinformation. But, Leicht says he often reminds his fellow team that research and development is usually more difficult than anyone anticipates.
"If this were easy, somebody would have done it already," he says, laughing. "We were both surprised nobody tried to have done it. And then when we got into it. 'Wow, it's really difficult.'"
Leicht points out that social media platforms don't want to be in the content-identification and moderation business because it is so complex, and as in the case of Twitter, is also seen as quelling free speech.
Right now, health care providers are limited in their ability to answer patients' questions or to counter misinformation by searching fact-checking websites such as snopes.com or factcheck.org. Leicht and his colleagues are using natural language processing, machine learning, data mining, specific information filters and retrieval methods that expand and automate the effort to identify inaccurate health information trending on social media.
"What our project actually does is take not only the pre-existing fact-checked data and query it all in one place, it brings it forward in a user-friendly fashion. But then it's also trying to come up with a way of adding to this data in a way that's faster than having a human fact checker just scan the web all the time, looking for what the new piece of misinformation is."
Leicht says computer science and data expertise will be leveraged with what social scientists know about how cultural and political fragmentation impact the spread of misinformation and how effective communication can become an anecdote.
Co-lead investigator Mary Stapel, MD, is Community Care lead physician for OSF HealthCare Saint Francis Medical Center and assistant program director for the combined Internal Medicine-Pediatrics Residency at the University of Illinois College of Medicine Peoria (UICOMP). Dr. Stapel says an innovative software application could make a significant difference, especially if alerts are easily available within software programs clinicians use every day.
Many community health nurses and digitally-enabled health care workers would also find the real-time misinformation alerts helpful. Those individuals work to build trust, particularly with those who have suffered past trauma or unequal treatment in their experience with the health care system. Dr. Stapel says community-based organizations also engage in "trust transfers," when they invite health care professionals to educate their clients and work collaboratively to identify the source of misinformation and publicly counter it.
Stopping viral spread
The alerts could allow organizations to stop bad information from going viral.
"If we can even get ahead of that – know what information is circulating and start feeding out more accurate information ahead of time through our community partners; that really could be a game changer when we're thinking about things like pandemics and infectious disease,"
Dr. Mary Stapel of OSF HealthCare & University of Illinois College of Medicine, Peoria
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Stapel says she learned that the problem of medical misinformation impacts everyone, regardless of their education level or other socio-economic factors.
"There was an interesting turn during the pandemic, where after education – large-scale campaigns and initiatives were put out around vaccination; there actually was sort of a flip to where communities of color, lower socio-economic communities were more vaccinated than upper class, more predominantly white communities so I really think it is across the spectrum."
Leicht says misinformation challenges many computer science and information mining techniques due to the way it changes quickly and spreads between languages and countries. It also requires human interpretation of the content identified and categorized through artificial intelligence.
"Having humans curate that a little bit … you have content experts that look at that and say, 'Is this dangerous or is it not? Is this trending, is it not?' And then figuring out a way to deliver that to the final customer in a way that requires as little inner interface by them as we can possibly get away with."
Leicht thinks it'll take two years to get the software application completed. Researchers believe there is demand for what they're creating. Already they have an industrial, non-profit software development partner, Meedan Labs, which creates open-source tools for creating and sharing context on digital media through verification, annotation, archival and translation services. The Discovery Partners Institute will also be involved in making the product commercially available not only for health care providers, but eventually for patients via electronic medical portals such as OSF MyChart.
Additional assets associated with this release, including photos, logos, video/audio clips are available on the
OSF Newsroom
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OSF HealthCare is an integrated health system owned and operated by The Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis, headquartered in Peoria, Illinois. OSF HealthCare employs nearly 24,000 Mission Partners in 150 locations, including 15 hospitals – 10 acute care, five critical access – with 2,089 licensed beds, and two colleges of nursing throughout Illinois and Michigan. The OSF HealthCare physician network employs more than 1,500 primary care, specialist and advanced practice providers. OSF HealthCare, through OSF Home Care Services, operates an extensive network of home health and hospice services. It also owns Pointcore, Inc., comprised of health care-related businesses; OSF HealthCare Foundation, the philanthropic arm for the organization; and OSF Ventures, which provides investment capital for promising health care innovation startups. More at osfhealthcare.org.
Jump Trading Simulation & Education Center, a part of OSF Innovation, is a collaboration between University of Illinois College of Medicine, Peoria and OSF HealthCare. Jump replicates a variety of patient care settings to ensure novice and seasoned clinicians can practice handling medical situations in a real-world environment. Boasting six floors and 168,000 square feet, the center is one of the largest of its kind and provides space for conferences, anatomic training, virtual reality and innovation. For more information, visit www.jumpsimulation.org.
Jump ARCHES partners:
The Health Care Engineering Systems Center of the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) focuses on connecting UIUC researchers with medical providers to create projects applicable to healthcare through interdisciplinary research. A large part of HCESC's mission is collaboration: their partnership with Jump Simulation Center in Urbana provides training on the latest mannequin-based simulators and virtual reality tools to meet the needs of medical and allied health organizations in central Illinois. Their Jump ARCHES partnership with OSF HealthCare in Peoria, provides direct access and competitive grants for researchers and clinicians of every discipline to work together and solve healthcare problems.
More at healtheng.illinois.edu.
University of Illinois College of Medicine Peoria (UICOMP) educates 244 medical students and nearly 300 physician residents annually. The College of Medicine is home to the Cancer Research Center, the Center for Outcomes Research and is a collaborator in Jump Simulation. Learn more about UICOMP at peoria.medicine.uic.edu.
Contact: Colleen Reynolds| Media Relations Coordinator – OSF HealthCare | (309) 825-7255
SOURCE OSF HealthCare
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