Introduction: The novel coronavirus COVID-19 has led to a global health emergency and was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) in March 2020. The pandemic changed breast cancer management significantly, altering treatment timelines and standard practices. In dealing with such disruptions, various communication tools were utilized worldwide including Twitter as a valuable resource for exchanges among patients, clinicians, and researchers. The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of COVID-19 on breast cancer treatment from a clinical perspective based on Twitter communications.

Methods: Tweets posted between March 2020-January 2021, through search terms breast cancer, breast oncology, pandemic, and covid19 were collected using Octoparse (a web-scraping tool) and Symplur (a data analytics program). In total, 22 countries were included in a dataset of 403 tweets, which were then reviewed by two investigators and analyzed using NVivo software.

Results: Using thematic analysis, the following major themes were extracted: increased efforts in knowledge sharing, patient vulnerabilities, healthcare disparities, resilience in healthcare teams, care prioritizations, patient hesitancy, best practice guidelines, and deviations in standard practices. The findings of this study reveal how key stakeholders coped with challenges and communicated knowledge during the pandemic. Twitter became an effective platform for staying current regarding evolving breast cancer care guidelines and sharing collective experiences.

Conclusions: Twitter enabled concise knowledge dissemination globally, facilitating international exchanges about unique pandemic related challenges in oncological care. Social media platforms can provide an important venue for critical health information exchange.