Feeling Blue? Go Online: An Empirical Study of Social Support Among Patients

Author List: Yan, Lu; Tan, Yong;
Information Systems Research, 2014, Volume 25, Issue 4, Page 690-709.
In this paper, we investigate whether social support exchanged in an online healthcare community benefits patients’ mental health. We propose a nonhomogeneous Partially Observed Markov Decision Process (POMDP) model to examine the latent health outcomes for online health community members. The transition between different health states is modeled as a probability function that incorporates different forms of social support that patients exchange via discussion board posts. We find that patients benefit from learning from others and that their participation in the online community helps them to improve their health and to better engage in their disease self-management process. Our results also reveal differences in the influence of various forms of social support exchanged on the evolution of patients’ health conditions. We find evidence that informational support is the most prevalent type in the online healthcare community. Nevertheless, emotional support plays the most significant role in helping patients move to a healthier state. Overall, the influence of social support is found to vary depending on patients’ health conditions. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposed POMDP model can provide accurate predictions for patients’ health states and can be used to recover missing or unavailable information on patients’ health conditions.
Keywords: healthcare;social networks;social support;partially observed Markov decision process;user-generated content
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#196 0.246 health healthcare medical care patient patients hospital hospitals hit health-care telemedicine systems records clinical practices physician electronic physicians longitudinal outcomes
#234 0.100 social networks influence presence interactions network media networking diffusion implications individuals people results exchange paper sites evidence self-disclosure important examine
#130 0.098 online users active paper using increasingly informational user data internet overall little various understanding empirical despite lead cascades help availability
#113 0.093 support decision dss systems guidance process making environments decisional users features capabilities provide decision-making user paper findings systems.decision components computer-based
#128 0.090 dynamic time dynamics model change study data process different changes using longitudinal understanding decisions develop temporal reveal associated state identifies
#45 0.089 community communities online members participants wikipedia social member knowledge content discussion collaboration attachment communication law virtual membership structures forms activities
#191 0.085 model models process analysis paper management support used environment decision provides based develop use using help literature mathematical presented formulation
#269 0.060 participation activities different roles projects examined outcomes level benefits conditions key importance isd suggest situations contextual furthermore benefit levels focus