A Thematic Framework for Analyzing Large-scale Self-reported Social Media Data on Opioid Use Disorder Treatment Using Buprenorphine Product

Background: One of the key FDA-approved medications for Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) is buprenorphine. Despite its popularity, individuals often report various information needs regarding buprenorphine treatment on social media platforms like Reddit. However, the key challenge is to characterize these needs. In this study, we propose a theme-based framework to curate and analyze large-scale data from social media to characterize self-reported treatment information needs (TINs). Methods: We collected 15,253 posts from r/Suboxone, one of the largest Reddit sub-community for buprenorphine products. Following the standard protocol, we first identified and defined five main themes from the data and then coded 6,000 posts based on these themes, where one post can be labeled with applicable one to three themes. Finally, we determined the most frequently appearing sub-themes (topics) for each theme by analyzing samples from each group. Results: Among the 6,000 posts, 40.3% contained a single theme, 36% two themes, and 13.9% three themes. The most frequent topics for each theme or theme combination came with several key findings - prevalent reporting of psychological and physical effects during recovery, complexities in accessing buprenorphine, and significant information gaps regarding medication administration, tapering, and usage of substances during different stages of recovery. Moreover, self-treatment strategies and peer-driven advice reveal valuable insights and potential misconceptions. Conclusions: The findings obtained using our proposed framework can inform better patient education and patient-provider communication, design systematic interventions to address treatment-related misconceptions and rumors, and streamline the generation of hypotheses for future research.

Characterizing Information Seeking Events in Health-Related Social Discourse

Social media sites have become a popular platform for individuals to seek and share health information. Despite the progress in natural language processing for social media mining, a gap remains in analyzing health-related texts on social discourse in the context of events. Event-driven analysis can offer insights into different facets of healthcare at an individual and collective level, including treatment options, misconceptions, knowledge gaps, etc. This paper presents a paradigm to characterize health-related information-seeking in social discourse through the lens of events. Events here are board categories defined with domain experts that capture the trajectory of the treatment/medication. To illustrate the value of this approach, we analyze Reddit posts regarding medications for Opioid Use Disorder (OUD), a critical global health concern. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to define event categories for characterizing information-seeking in OUD social discourse. Guided by domain experts, we develop TREAT-ISE, a novel multilabel treatment information-seeking event dataset to analyze online discourse on an event-based framework. This dataset contains Reddit posts on information-seeking events related to recovery from OUD, where each post is annotated based on the type of events. We also establish a strong performance benchmark (77.4% F1 score) for the task by employing several machine learning and deep learning classifiers. Finally, we thoroughly investigate the performance and errors of ChatGPT on this task, providing valuable insights into the LLM's capabilities and ongoing characterization efforts.