Apr 15, 2015 01:27 PM EDT By Staff Reporter, UniversityHerald Reporter

Posting information about personal health on Twitter could be helpful for hospitals.      

Researchers at the University of Arizona found that the chronic condition of asthma and how asthma-related tweets, analyzed alongside other data, can help predict asthma-related emergency room visits.

"We realized that asthma is one of the biggest traffic generators in the emergency department," Sudha Ram, who led the study, said in a statement. "Often what happens is that there are not the right people in the ED to treat these patients, or not the right equipment, and that causes a lot of unforeseen problems."

For the study, researchers created a model that was able to successfully predict approximately how many asthma sufferers would visit the emergency room at a large hospital in Dallas on a given day, based on an analysis of data gleaned from electronic medical records, air quality sensors and Twitter.

Over a three-month period, Ram and her team collected air quality data from environmental sensors in the vicinity of the Dallas hospital. They also gathered and analyzed asthma-related tweets containing certain keywords such as "asthma," "inhaler" or "wheezing." After collecting millions of tweets from across the globe, they used text-mining techniques to zoom in on relevant tweets in the ZIP codes where most of the hospital's patients live, according to electronic medical records.

The researchers found that as certain air quality measures worsened, asthma visits to the emergency room went up. Asthma visits also increased as the number of asthma-related tweets went up.

"You can get a lot of interesting insights from social media that you can't from electronic health records," Ram said. "You only go to the doctor once in a while, and you don't always tell your doctor how much you've been exercising or what you've been eating. But people share that information all the time on social media. We think that prediction models like this can be very useful, if we can combine various types of data, to address chronic diseases."

More than 25 million Americans are affected by asthma, which accounts for approximately 2 million emergency department visits, half a million hospitalizations and 3,500 deaths annually, incurring more than $50 billion in direct medical costs.

These findings, which are detailed in the forthcoming IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics' special issue on big data, could help hospital emergency departments nationwide plan better with regard to staffing and resource management.

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