Healthcare Insights
Top 25 organizations with the most digital opinion leaders
Healthcare experts and key opinion leaders (KOLs) live digital lives, like most of us. Life science companies are paying attention to KOLs’ online lifestyles to engage with them more effectively. As a result, many medical device and pharmaceutical companies are reimagining traditional KOL roles as digital influencers, or digital opinion leaders (DOLs).
The rise in telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic aligned with a shift to more virtual interactions with medical affairs and supply reps at healthcare provider offices. Understanding an expert’s sphere of influence, areas of focus and engagement in their community can help life science companies develop stronger KOL/DOL engagement strategies.
Which organizations have the most healthcare DOLs?
Monocl, a Definitive Healthcare company, tracks over 11 million global experts in healthcare. A wide range of criteria are used to identify DOLs, including an expert’s use of Twitter.
This list shows the top organizations by their total number of experts with a Twitter account.
| Rank | Organization | Location | Number of experts | Explore dataset |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Johns Hopkins University | Baltimore, United States | 955 | Explore |
| 2 | Stanford University | Stanford, United States | 924 | Explore |
| 3 | Massachusetts General Hospital | Boston, United States | 850 | Explore |
| 4 | Brigham and Women's Hospital | Boston, United States | 804 | Explore |
| 5 | UC San Francisco | San Francisco, United States | 798 | Explore |
| 6 | University of Toronto | Toronto, Canada | 798 | Explore |
| 7 | Cleveland Clinic | Cleveland, United States | 791 | Explore |
| 8 | Columbia University | New York, United States | 738 | Explore |
| 9 | University of Michigan | Ann Arbor, United States | 666 | Explore |
| 10 | Mayo Clinic Hospital - Saint Marys Campus | Rochester, United States | 659 | Explore |
| 11 | University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center | Houston, United States | 632 | Explore |
| 12 | University College London | London, United Kingdom | 611 | Explore |
| 13 | University of Washington | Seattle, United States | 594 | Explore |
| 14 | University of Pennsylvania | Philadelphia, United States | 545 | Explore |
| 15 | Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai | New York, United States | 533 | Explore |
| 16 | University of Oxford | Oxford, United Kingdom | 531 | Explore |
| 17 | Duke University Health System | Durham, United States | 530 | Explore |
| 18 | Imperial College London | London, United Kingdom | 518 | Explore |
| 19 | Emory University | Atlanta, United States | 515 | Explore |
| 20 | University of Cambridge | Cambridge, United Kingdom | 510 | Explore |
| 21 | Northwestern University | Evanston, United States | 510 | Explore |
| 22 | University of Pittsburgh | Pittsburgh, United States | 500 | Explore |
| 23 | King's College London | London, United Kingdom | 495 | Explore |
| 24 | Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center | New York, United States | 465 | Explore |
| 25 | Harvard Medical School | Boston, United States | 435 | Explore |
Fig. 1 Data is from the Monocl ExpertInsight product. Data is proprietary. Accessed April 2022.
Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland has over 950 healthcare experts using Twitter. Stanford University in California currently has about 925 healthcare experts with Twitter accounts. Organizations outside the U.S. that make the list of most DOLs include University of Toronto, University College London, University of Oxford, Imperial College London, University of Cambridge and King’s College London.
What is a digital opinion leader (DOL)?
Digital opinion leaders, also known as digital influencers, are healthcare providers and medical, scientific or public health experts who engage in digital and social dialogue about scientific, medical and healthcare related topics. Industry analysts, journalists, patient advocates, current or former patients and caregivers can become digital influencers in the healthcare space as well.
DOLs play an increasingly important role in the life sciences and healthcare industries as they represent a new group of external experts who are informing the online discourse about therapeutic areas and other important healthcare topics. Digital influencers communicate quickly and widely without approval processes and reach audiences that might be difficult to access through traditional methods like scientific publications.
DOLs also include rising stars: young medical and scientific experts who show potential to be an influential voice in the industry.
Learn more
Healthcare Insights are developed with healthcare commercial intelligence from the Definitive Healthcare platform. Book a demo today to see how machine learning and billions of medical claims data combine to help you find the game-changing expert who can accelerate your commercialization process.
You might also be interested in...
