Abstract/Summary

Background: Online health communities (OHCs) experience difficulties in utilizing patient-reported posts to fulfill the information needs of online patients concerning healthrelated issues. Objectives: We aim to propose a comprehensive method that leverages medical domain knowledge to extract useful information from posts to fulfill information needs of online patients. Methods: A knowledge representation framework based on authoritative knowledge sources in the medical field for the OHC is proposed. On the basis of the framework, a health-related information extraction process for analyzing the posts in the OHC is proposed. Then, knowledge support rate (KSR) and effective information rate (EIR) are introduced as metrics to evaluate changes in knowledge extracted from the knowledge sources in terms of fulfilling the information needs of patients in the OHC. Results: On the basis of a dataset with 372,343 posts in an OHC, experimental results indicate that our method effectively extracts relevant knowledge for online patients. Moreover, KSR and EIR are feasible metrics of changes in knowledge in terms of fulfilling the information needs. Conclusions: The OHCs effectively fulfill the information needs of patients by utilizing authoritative domain knowledge in the medical field. Knowledge-based services for online patients facilitate an intelligent OHC in the future.