Social Networks in Healthcare, Case Study

Synonyms

Electronic health record; Patient similarity

Patient similarity:

The clinical similarity score between pairwise patients derived from their records

Patient network:

A network with nodes representing patient entities, edges representing pairwise patient similarities

Definition

Constructing an undirected patient network with patients as nodes and pairwise clinical similarities as edge weights can enable many applications in modern medical informatics such as physician decision support, risk stratification, and comparative effectiveness research, because similar patients have similar clinical characteristics and thus the treatment on one patient might be helpful to his/her similar patients. Therefore, constructing such a patient network is very important to data-driven analytics for healthcare, and effective patient similarity evaluation is the key to construct the patient network.

Introduction

Healthcare has undergone a tremendous growth in the use of electronic health records...