Mitigating healthcare supply chain challenges under disaster conditions: a holistic AI-based analysis of social media data

A key advantage of social media is the real-time exchange of views with large communities. In disaster situations, such bidirectional information exchange is most useful to victims and support teams, especially in communications with authorities, volunteers, and the public. This paper addresses challenges faced by the healthcare supply chain during the COVID-19 pandemic with analyses of Twitter data using an Artificial Intelligence-driven multi-step approach. We investigate tweets for information about healthcare supply chains, such as the scarcity of testing kits, oxygen cylinders, and hospital beds during the pandemic. We deployed machine learning to classify such tweets into imperative and non-imperative categories based on need severity. The study sought to predict the location of victims requesting help based on their imperative tweets if geo-tag information was missing. The proposed approach used four steps: (1) keyword-based informative tweet search, (2) raw tweet pre-processing, (3) content analysis to identify tweet trends, public sentiment, topics related to healthcare supply chain challenges, and crisis classification to label imperative and non-imperative tweets, (4) locating the point-of-crisis from imperative tweets to facilitate coordination of help operations. The pre-processing of tweets, trend analysis, and sentiment analysis relied on natural language processing and machine learning for topic modelling (K-mean clustering), crisis classification (random forest), and point-of-crisis detection (Markov chain). Results demonstrate the potential to capture significant, timely, and actionable information on healthcare supply chain challenges to respond quickly and appropriately in a pandemic.