Patient-centered information extraction for effective search on healthcare forum

Abstract

Online healthcare forums are one of the major social media in Health 2.0 for patients and caregivers to share personal experience and to help each other. However, current forums do not support effective information search and thus users are unable to fully leverage the rich information in the forums. In this work, we propose patient-centered information extraction to better organize the information in the forum and have developed a patient-centered medical information database extracted from a forum. In this system, the patients discussed on the forum are identified and their shared medical information is aggregated and associated with the corresponding patients. The experimental evaluation shows that our system can provide better information search results than traditional approaches. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.