How sensitive are hospitals to the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) patients? In a 2010 survey by Lambda Legal, 70 percent of transgender patients and 56 percent of gay/lesbian/bisexual patients reported discrimination from health care providers. Clinicians refused to provide needed care, refused to touch them or used excessive precautions, blamed them for their health status, were verbally abusive or were physically violent.

A new exploratory study, published in the October issue of Social Science & Medicine, turned to social media for a view from the ground. The researchers, Yulin Hswen of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Jared Hawkins, PhD, MMSc, of Boston Children’s Hospital’s Informatics Program, analyzed 1,856 publicly available tweets from 2015-2017.

“Information from social media and other online sources can help us gain authentic and unsolicited accounts from vulnerable patient groups, like LGBT individuals who are not typically represented,” says Hswen.

Based on the tweets, the team determined which hospitals were more supportive of LGBT patients (the blue dots in the above map) and which were less supportive (the red dots).

The identified tweets included Twitter handles from 653 hospitals and contained LGBT-related terms: LGBT, transgender, trans, intersex, sex change, transisbeautiful, tranny, drag queen, preferred pronoun, transhealth, genderodyssey, cis, gay, lesbian, queer, rainbowhealth, gender fluid, homosexual, bisexual, homo, homophob and transphobe. A tweet classed as supportive might read, “@Hospital is hosting a LGBT resource fair;” a negative tweet might read: “Having sex with men does not mean I deserve less @Hospital.”