Fulfilling information needs of patients in online health communities

Background Online health communities (OHCs) experience difficulties in utilising patient reported posts to fulfil the information needs of online patients concerning health related issues. Objectives We aim to propose a comprehensive method that leverages medical domain knowledge to extract useful information from posts to fulfil information needs of online patients. Methods A knowledge representation framework based on authoritative knowledge sources in the medical field for the OHC is proposed. On the basis of the framework, a health related information extraction process for analysing the posts in the OHC is proposed. Then, knowledge support rate (KSR) and effective information rate (EIR) are introduced as metrics to evaluate changes in knowledge extracted from the knowledge sources in terms of fulfilling the information needs of patients in the OHC. Results On the basis of a data set with 372 343 posts in an OHC, experimental results indicate that our method effectively extracts relevant knowledge for online patients. Moreover, KSR and EIR are feasible metrics of changes in knowledge in terms of fulfilling the information needs. Conclusions The OHCs effectively fulfil the information needs of patients by utilising authoritative domain knowledge in the medical field. Knowledge based services for online patients facilitate an intelligent OHC in the future.