Personalized content recommendation in online health communities

Purpose Recommending suitable content for users of online health communities (OHCs) is critical for overcoming information overload problem and facilitate medical decision making, but remains not fully investigated. This study aims to provide a content recommendation approach to automatically match valuable health-related information for OHC members. Design/methodology/approach A framework of health-related content recommendation was proposed by leveraging rich social information in online communities. The authors constructed user influence relationship (UIR) utilizing users' interaction records, user profiles and user-generated content. The initial user rating matrix and the user post matching matrix were then created by analyzing text content of posts. Finally, the user rating matrix and the recommended content were generated for community members. Datasets were collected from an OHC to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Findings The experimental results revealed that the proposed method statistically outperformed baseline models in content recommendation for users of OHCs. Research limitations/implications The incorporation of social information can significantly enhance the performance of content recommendation in OHCs. The user post matching degree based on text analysis can improve the effectiveness of recommendation. Practical implications This study potentially contributes to the social support exchange and medical decision making of community members and the sustainable prosperity of OHCs. Originality/value This study proposes a novel social content recommendation method for online health consumers based on UIRs by leveraging social information in OHCs. The results indicate the significance of social information in content recommendation of healthcare social media.