Dramatic Increases in Telehealth-Related Tweets during the Early COVID-19 Pandemic: A Sentiment Analysis.

ABSTRACT: The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a large expansion of telehealth, but little is known about user sentiment. Tweets containing the terms "telehealth" and "telemedicine" were extracted (n = 192,430) from the official Twitter API between November 2019 and April 2020. A random subset of 2000 tweets was annotated by trained readers to classify tweets according to their content, including telehealth, sentiment, user type, and relation to COVID-19. A state-of-the-art NLP model (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, BERT) was used to categorize the remaining tweets. Following a low and fairly stable level of activity, telehealth tweets rose dramatically beginning the first week of March 2020. The sentiment was overwhelmingly positive or neutral, with only a small percentage of

SUBMITTER: Champagne-Langabeer T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8230122 | biostudies-literature | 2021 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature