An answer recommendation framework for an online cancer community forum.

Health community forums are a kind of online platform to discuss various matters related to management of illness. People are increasingly searching for answers online, particularly when they are diagnosed with cancer like life-threatening diseases. People seek suggestions or advice through these platforms to make decisions during their treatments. However, locating the correct information or similar people is often a great challenge for them. In this scenario, this paper proposes an answer recommendation system in an online breast cancer community forum that provide guidance and valuable references to users while making decisions. The answer is the summary of already discussed topic in the forum, so that they do not need to go through all the answer posts which spans over multiple pages or initiate a thread once again. There are three phases for the answer recommendation system, including query similarity model to retrieve the past similar query, query-answer pair generation and answer recommendation. Query similarity model is employed by a Siamese network with Bi-LSTM architecture which could achieve an F1-score of 85.5%. Also, the paper shows the efficacy of transfer learning technique to generalize the model well in our breast cancer query-query pair data set. The query-answer pairs are generated by an extractive summarization technique that is based on an optimization algorithm. The effectiveness of the generated summary is evaluated based on a manually generated summary, and the result shows a ROUGE-1 score of 49%.

Novel Approach to Cluster Patient-Generated Data Into Actionable Topics: Case Study of a Web-Based Breast Cancer Forum.

BACKGROUND: The increasing use of social media and mHealth apps has generated new opportunities for health care consumers to share information about their health and well-being. Information shared through social media contains not only medical information but also valuable information about how the survivors manage disease and recovery in the context of daily life. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to determine the feasibility of acquiring and modeling the topics of a major online breast cancer support forum. Breast cancer patient support forums were selected to discover the hidden, less obvious aspects of disease management and recovery. METHODS: First, manual topic categorization was performed using qualitative content analysis (QCA) of each individual forum board. Second, we requested permission from the Breastcancer.org Community for a more in-depth analysis of the postings. Topic modeling was then performed using open source software Machine Learning Language Toolkit, followed by multiple linear regression (MLR) analysis to detect highly correlated topics among the different website forums. RESULTS: QCA of the forums resulted in 20 categories of user discussion. The final topic model organized >4 million postings into 30 manageable topics. Using qualitative analysis of the topic models and statistical analysis, we grouped these 30 topics into 4 distinct clusters with similarity scores of ≥0.80; these clusters were labeled Symptoms & Diagnosis, Treatment, Financial, and Family & Friends. A clinician review confirmed the clinical significance of the topic clusters, allowing for future detection of actionable items within social media postings. To identify the most significant topics across individual forums, MLR demonstrated that 6 topics-based on the Akaike information criterion values ranging from -642.75 to -412.32-were statistically significant. CONCLUSIONS: The developed method provides an insight into the areas of interest and concern, including those not ascertainable in the clinic. Such topics included support from lay and professional caregivers and late side effects of therapy that consumers discuss in social media and may be of interest to clinicians. The developed methods and results indicate the potential of social media to inform the clinical workflow with regards to the impact of recovery on daily life.

Know thy eHealth user: Development of biopsychosocial personas from a study of older adults with heart failure.

BACKGROUND: Personas are a canonical user-centered design method increasingly used in health informatics research. Personas-empirically-derived user archetypes-can be used by eHealth designers to gain a robust understanding of their target end users such as patients. OBJECTIVE: To develop biopsychosocial personas of older patients with heart failure using quantitative analysis of survey data. METHOD: Data were collected using standardized surveys and medical record abstraction from 32 older adults with heart failure recently hospitalized for acute heart failure exacerbation. Hierarchical cluster analysis was performed on a final dataset of n=30. Nonparametric analyses were used to identify differences between clusters on 30 clustering variables and seven outcome variables. RESULTS: Six clusters were produced, ranging in size from two to eight patients per cluster. Clusters differed significantly on these biopsychosocial domains and subdomains: demographics (age, sex); medical status (comorbid diabetes); functional status (exhaustion, household work ability, hygiene care ability, physical ability); psychological status (depression, health literacy, numeracy); technology (Internet availability); healthcare system (visit by home healthcare, trust in providers); social context (informal caregiver support, cohabitation, marital status); and economic context (employment status). Tabular and narrative persona descriptions provide an easy reference guide for informatics designers. DISCUSSION: Personas development using approaches such as clustering of structured survey data is an important tool for health informatics professionals. We describe insights from our study of patients with heart failure, then recommend a generic ten-step personas development process. Methods strengths and limitations of the study and of personas development generally are discussed.

What Do They Mean by "Health Informatics"? Health Informations Posts Compared to Program Standards.

There is a lack of alignment between and within the competencies and skills required by health informatics (HI) related jobs and those present in academic curriculum frameworks. This study uses computational topic modeling for gap analysis of career needs vs. curriculum objectives. The seven AMIA-CAHIIM-accepted core knowledge domains were used to categorize a corpus of HI-related job postings (N = 475) from a major United States-based job posting website. Computational modeling-generated topics were created and then compared and matched to the seven core knowledge domains. The HI-defining core domain, representing the intersection of health, technology and social/behavioral sciences matched only 45.9% of job posting content. Therefore, the authors suggest that bidirectional communication between academia and industry is needed in order to better align educational objectives to the demands of the job market.