Measuring Relevant Information in Health Social Network Conversations and Clinical Diagnosis Cases.

Albert Moreira,Alberto Muñoz,José Crespo,Raul Alonso-Calvo

doi:10.3390/ijerph15122787

Abstract

The Internet and social media is an enormous source of information. Health social networks and online collaborative environments enable users to create shared content that afterwards can be discussed. The aim of this paper is to present a novel methodology designed for quantifying relevant information provided by different participants in clinical online discussions. The main goal of the methodology is to facilitate the comparison of participant interactions in clinical conversations. A set of key indicators for different aspects of clinical conversations and specific clinical contributions within a discussion have been defined. Particularly, three new indicators have been proposed to make use of biomedical knowledge extraction based on standard terminologies and ontologies. These indicators allow measuring the relevance of information of each participant of the clinical conversation. Proposed indicators have been applied to one discussion extracted from PatientsLikeMe, as well as to two real clinical cases from the Sanar collaborative discussion system. Results obtained from indicators in the tested cases have been compared with clinical expert opinions to check indicators validity. The methodology has been successfully used for describing participant interactions in real clinical cases belonging to a collaborative clinical case discussion tool and from a conversation from a health social network. This work can be applied to assess collaborative diagnoses, discussions among patients, and the participation of students in clinical case discussions. It permits moderators and educators to obtain a quantitatively measure of the contribution of each participant.

Highlights

The area of health information systems is constantly growing
A novel methodology has been proposed in order to facilitate the characterization of discussions and participants in collaborative diagnosis diagnosis tools tools and to enable its application to health social and participants in collaborative diagnosis tools and to enable its application to health social networks
The methodology can be applied to assess collaborative diagnoses among professionals, health related discussions among patients, and the way collaborative diagnoses among professionals, health related discussions among patients, and the way medical students contribute in discussions of clinical cases

Summary

Introduction

The area of health information systems is constantly growing. Besides the private information systems that are maintained by hospitals and health institutions organizations, in recent years the proliferation of health social networks or online health communities have proven its worth both for patients themselves and for research, i.e., for crowdsource health research studies [1]. Several factors may lead to a lack of understanding of what constitutes effective communication, leading to medical errors that threaten patient safety. In developing countries [2,3], some diseases often cannot be treated in time because of the lack of a basic health infrastructure. The lack of adequate support for diagnosis can lead to incorrect administration of medications or serious complications and, in some cases, may lead to the death of the patient

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