Recommender Systems In Context: Health Recommender Systems

Amber Ferger
6/30/2020

What is an HRS?

Health Recommender System

  • Provides recommendations on diagnosis/treatment given diagnosis search

The Problem with self-searches

  • Findability, Comprehendability, Reliability

The Solution: Personalized Health Recommendation Systems

Personalized based on personal medical history

User Profile : individual health data (Personal Health Record - PHR)

Recommended Items: medically accepted & verified information

  • How to cope with a disease
  • Disease definitions
  • Care Plans
  • Educational materials for healthier living

Who can use it & how?

Health professional:

  • Retrieve relevant information for a patient
  • Educational materials linked to patient conditions
  • Clinical guidelines & research

Patient:

  • Layman-friendly content for disease understanding & care

System structure

The Recommendations

Content-based collaborative filtering

  • High degree of confidentiality of patient conditions
  • User's personal data used for recommendations
  • Document ranking

Sources:

  • Electronic Health Records - NLP, Entity Extraction
  • Insurance Claims - explicit diagnoses

Evaluation

  • Health professionals assess the recommendations

Benefits

  • Patient-centric information
  • Validated, relevant information
  • Better understanding (layman friendly) & safer outcomes
  • All user conditions taken into account (drug interactions)
  • No info overload!

Resources

  • Wiesner M, Pfeifer D. Health recommender systems: concepts, requirements, technical basics and challenges. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2014;11(3):2580-2607. Published 2014 Mar 3. doi:10.3390/ijerph110302580