Finding the Signal in the Noise Could Social Media be Utilized for Early Hospital Notification of Multiple Casualty Events

Analyzing tweets from the day of select recent U.S. mass casualty events through seven days post-event revealed that a 200 tweets/minute threshold was reached fastest after the Napa earthquake, followed by the Boston Marathon bombing and the San Francisco plane crash. The authors explained that this threshold could have been used as a signaling mechanism to place local hospitals on standby for possible large scale events, since the messaging preceded patient arrival in all cases they studied.