NCRI Health

Who We Are

NCRI Health is the public health research arm of the Network Contagion Research Institute. NCRI is recognized as a leading source of social media research data, with deep expertise in how health narratives spread and evolve across online platforms, communities, and media ecosystems.

We bring that infrastructure and analytical capacity to bear on medicine’s most neglected research questions. Social network analysis, citation mapping, and large-scale data analysis of online health discourse can reveal how scientific consensus forms, where it breaks down, and how patient communities shape — and are shaped by — the information available to them.

What We Work On

The relationship between public discourse and medical research is underappreciated. Online health communities generate enormous amounts of signal about patient experience, emerging symptoms, and treatment outcomes. At the same time, social media shapes which conditions receive attention, which findings get amplified, and which voices are heard in research and policy conversations.

We study these dynamics rigorously. Our work sits at the intersection of public health, computational social science, and evidence synthesis. We focus on conditions where large gaps remain between patient experience, the published literature, and clinical practice.