"How Did We Get Here?": Topic Drift in Online Health Discussions.

Background: Patients increasingly use online health communities to exchange health information and peer support. During the progression of health discussions, a change of topic-topic drift-can occur. Topic drift is a frequent phenomenon linked to incoherence and frustration in online communities and other forms of computer-mediated communication.

Leveraging cues from person-generated health data for peer matching in online communities.

Objective: Online health communities offer a diverse peer support base, yet users can struggle to identify suitable peer mentors as these communities grow. To facilitate mentoring connections, we designed a peer-matching system that automatically profiles and recommends peer mentors to mentees based on person-generated health data (PGHD). This study examined the profile characteristics that mentees value when choosing a peer mentor.

Automatically Detecting Failures in Natural Language Processing Tools for Online Community Text.

Background: The prevalence and value of patient-generated health text are increasing, but processing such text remains problematic. Although existing biomedical natural language processing (NLP) tools are appealing, most were developed to process clinician- or researcher-generated text, such as clinical notes or journal articles. In addition to being constructed for different types of text, other challenges of using existing NLP include constantly changing technologies, source vocabularies, and characteristics of text.

Homophily of Vocabulary Usage: Beneficial Effects of Vocabulary Similarity on Online Health Communities Participation.

Online health communities provide popular platforms for individuals to exchange psychosocial support and form ties. Although regular active participation (i.e.

Exploring the relationship between changes in weight and utterances in an online weight loss forum: a content and correlational analysis study.

Background: There is increasing interest in the use of online forums as a component of eHealth weight loss interventions. Although the research is mixed on the utility of online forums in general, results suggest that there is promise to this, particularly if the systems can be designed well to support healthful interactions that foster weight loss and continued engagement.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the styles of utterances individuals make on an online weight loss forum and week-to-week fluctuations in weight.

Patient moderator interaction in online health communities.

An increasing number of people visit online health communities to share experiences and seek health information. Although studies have enumerated reasons for patients' visits to online communities for health information from peers, we know little about how patients gain health information from the moderators in these communities. We qualitatively analyze 480 patient and moderator posts from six communities to understand how moderators fulfill patients' information needs.

Evaluating health interest profiles extracted from patient-generated data.

Patient-generated health data (PGHD) offers a promising resource for shaping patient care, self-management, population health, and health policy. Although emerging technologies bolster opportunities to extract PGHD and profile the needs and experiences of patients, few efforts examine the validity and use of such profiles from the patient's perspective. To address this gap, we explore health interest profiles built automatically from online community posts.

Barriers to physical activity: a study of self-revelation in an online community.

The importance of regular physical activity to overall health has been well established, yet adults in the United States are leading increasingly sedentary lives. Research suggests that lowering perceived barriers to exercise is an effective strategy for encouraging physical activity. This article describes the top barriers that emerged from a qualitative analysis of message board traffic from a three-month healthy lifestyle intervention that promoted physical activity and healthy eating.

Bringing the Field into Focus: User-centered Design of a Patient Expertise Locator.

Managing personal aspects of health is challenging for many patients, particularly those facing a serious condition such as cancer. Finding experienced patients, who can share their knowledge from managing a similar health situation, is of tremendous value. Users of health-related social software form a large base of such knowledge, yet these tools often lack features needed to locate peers with expertise.

Locating Patient Expertise in Everyday Life.

Coping with a new health issue often requires individuals to acquire knowledge and skills to manage personal health. Many patients turn to one another for experiential expertise outside the formal bounds of the health-care system. Internet-based social software can facilitate expertise sharing among patients, but provides only limited ways for users to locate sources of patient expertise.

Using mobile & personal sensing technologies to support health behavior change in everyday life: lessons learned.

Lifestyle modification is a key facet of the prevention and management of chronic diseases. Mobile devices that people already carry provide a promising platform for facilitating these lifestyle changes. This paper describes key lessons learned from the development and evaluation of two mobile systems for encouraging physical activity.

Incorporating collaboratory concepts into informatics in support of translational interdisciplinary biomedical research.

Due to its complex nature, modern biomedical research has become increasingly interdisciplinary and collaborative in nature. Although a necessity, interdisciplinary biomedical collaboration is difficult. There is, however, a growing body of literature on the study and fostering of collaboration in fields such as computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) and information science (IS).

Participatory design of a collaborative clinical trial protocol writing system.

Objective: To explore concrete approaches to socio-technical design of collaborative healthcare information systems and to design a groupware technology for collaborative clinical trial protocol writing.

Method: We conducted "quick and dirty ethnography" through semi-structured interviews, observational studies, and work artifacts analysis to understand the group work for protocol development. We used participatory design through evolutionary prototyping to explore the feature space of a collaborative writing system.

Rapid improvement of calcinosis in juvenile dermatomyositis with alendronate therapy.

A 6-year-old boy with improving juvenile dermatomyositis (JDM) developed severe and debilitating calcinosis, unresponsive to diltiazem and probenecid. Alendronate produced dramatic improvement within 1 month and by 12 months calcinosis had virtually resolved. The response was followed by bone mineral content measurements.

Asynchronous communication among clinical researchers: a study for systems design.

Group work is an essential part of modern health care. Although there have been advances in the technology of communication, these have not necessarily led to efficient and effective communication among collaborating health-care professionals. Instead, barriers such as varied organizational cultures, different training backgrounds, and varied time schedules can overwhelm technological solutions and impede efficient communication.

Technology, work, and information flows: lessons from the implementation of a wireless alert pager system.

The combination of collaborative work practices and information technology affect the flow of information in clinical settings. The introduction of a new technology into these settings can change not only established work practices but also the information flows. In this paper, we examine the introduction of a wireless alerts pager in a surgical intensive care unit (SICU).

A collaborative clinical trial protocol writing system.

Increasing complexity in medicine has caused clinical trial experts with disparate backgrounds from multiple organizations to collaborate when developing clinical trial protocols. Although many protocol-authoring tools provide computerbased decision support to assist in protocol writing, few of them provide sufficient collaboration support for a group of protocol writers. The iterative group writing activities among interdisciplinary clinical trial experts call for advanced tool support.

An ethnographic study of collaborative clinical trial protocol writing.

Clinical trial protocol documents play an important role in clinical research. However, clinical protocol writing remains a complex and relatively un-studied process. Protocols are often written by teams of people, yet little prior research has captured the problems or analyzed the collaboration support needs of protocol writers.

Incorporating ideas from computer-supported cooperative work.

Many information systems have failed when deployed into complex health-care settings. We believe that one cause of these failures is the difficulty in systematically accounting for the collaborative and exception-filled nature of medical work. In this methodological review paper, we highlight research from the field of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) that could help biomedical informaticists recognize and design around the kinds of challenges that lead to unanticipated breakdowns and eventual abandonment of their systems.

Scenario-based participatory design of a collaborative clinical trial protocol authoring system.

We present our experience of using prototype scenarios to actively involve users in the design of a collaborative clinical trial protocol authoring system. This method enables us to do usability testing and elicit prompt user feedback at the early phase of de-sign. We conclude that it is an effective approach to the design of complex medical information systems.

Challenges to physicians' use of a wireless alert pager.

Pagers, personal data assistants (PDAs) and other devices that have wireless connectivity are becoming a popular method for delivering patient related information to medical decision makers. Although medical informatics research has emphasized the design, and implementation of pagers as event notification mechanisms, researchers have not paid as much attention to how this technology impacts medical work. We present a case study of physicians in a Surgical Intensive Care Unit (SICU) using wireless alert pagers.