Integrating and Analyzing Social Media Health Data

Social Health Records (SHRs) refer to open health data, generated and shared by patients on online social media, as opposed to the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) that are created and managed by authorized providers. SHRs are changing the healthcare paradigm from the authoritative provider-centric EHR model to a collaborative and patient-oriented healthcare framework. This talk will present a Social Health Record Integration and Analytics Framework to leverage Social Health Records for gaining insights into population-level and individual level healthcare practices and behaviors. The SHR integration and analytics framework builds a coherent knowledge base, linking the Social Health Records that are ‘spilled’ in distributed online social media, with other online health information sources, such as results from authoritative medical research. We discuss SHR characteristics and challenges, including data quality, data privacy, and data governance issues, in integrating and repurposing the shared open SHR. We present four research projects on the semantic integration of heterogeneous health data sources, Social Health Records-based epidemic surveillance systems, quantification of public “health concern” levels, and comorbidity prediction using progression trajectories from SHR.