Impact of Predicting Health Care Utilization Via Web Search Behavior: A Data-Driven Analysis.

Background: By recent estimates, the steady rise in health care costs has deprived more than 45 million Americans of health care services and has encouraged health care providers to better understand the key drivers of health care utilization from a population health management perspective. Prior studies suggest the feasibility of mining population-level patterns of health care resource utilization from observational analysis of Internet search logs; however, the utility of the endeavor to the various stakeholders in a health ecosystem remains unclear.

Objective: The aim was to carry out a closed-loop evaluation of the utility of health care use predictions using the conversion rates of advertisements that were displayed to the predicted future utilizers as a surrogate.