The social phenotype: Extracting a patient-centered perspective of diabetes from health-related blogs

摘要

MotivationsIt has recently been argued [1] that the effectiveness of a cure depends on the doctor–patient shared understanding of an illness and its treatment. Although a better communication between doctor and patient can be pursued through dedicated training programs, or by collecting patients’ experiences and symptoms by means of questionnaires, the impact of these actions is limited by time and resources. In this paper we suggest that a patient-centered view of a disease – as well as potential misalignment between patient and doctor focuses – can be inferred at a larger scale through automated textual analysis of health-related forums. People are generating an enormous amount of social data to describe their health care experiences, and continuously search information about diseases, symptoms, diagnoses, doctors, treatment options and medicines. By automatically collecting, analyzing and exploiting this information, it is possible to obtain a more detailed and nuanced vision of patients’ experience, that we call the “social phenotype” of diseases.