• Health economists shun Twitter

      01/18/2012
      Austin Frakt

    I have no idea if health economists are under-represented on Twitter, but I do know that Twitter would be far more useful to the small number of us there if more health economists used it (actively!). I’ve seen a bunch on Facebook. So why not Twitter? What gives?

    I count only three health economists on Twitter. Am I missing some?

    1. Austin Frakt <— me!
    2. Steve Parente <— not me!
    3. Paul Hughes-Cromwick <— also not me!

    AF

     
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    • by Stephanie on January 19th, 2012 at 17:30

      4. Karen Davis <– also not you or me! some other commonwealth fund people are also on twitter but not sure how often any of them actually tweet.

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      • by Austin Frakt on January 19th, 2012 at 18:50

        OK, I have clarified it as “active on Twitter.” Karen Davis has 0 tweets and is only following three feeds: Twitter itself (why?), The Commonwealth Fund, and The US Backgammon Federation.

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    • by Karen Grepin on January 20th, 2012 at 15:29

      I guess you might count me as a health economist and I am active on Twitter, although my research focus is mostly international:

      @KarenGrepin

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    • by April Harding on January 21st, 2012 at 16:32

      Good question Austin.

      Adam Wagstaff, a health economist in the World Bank’s research department tweets @adamw2011

      I’m a health economist also at the World Bank. I tweet on health policy and health development assistance issues (and a bit of this and that) @april_harding

      I’ve noticed this pattern: the most interesting exchanges on policy issues among health economists in Europe happen via listservs (Anglo-American Health Policy Network; and, European Health Policy Group). In the US, the action is in the blogs. Neither community has taken to the twittersphere.

      It’s hard to even come up with a hypothesis about the low uptake of twitter among health economists. Are there other professions (or sub-professions) where we know the uptake rate is higher? Do we know if we are especially bad?

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    • by James Buchanan on April 5th, 2012 at 08:27

      There are plenty of health economists on Twitter, you need to look harder!

      Have a look through the followers of our Twitter feed (and see also the people that we follow): https://twitter.com/HERC_Oxford

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