A System for Uncovering Latent Connectivity of Health Care Providers in Online Reviews

The contacts a health care provider (HCP), like a physician, has to other HCPs is perceived as a quality characteristic by patients. So far, only the German physician rating website jameda.de gives information about the interconnectedness of HCPs in business networks. However, this network has to be maintained manually and is thus incomplete. We therefore developed a system for uncovering latent connectivity of HCPs in online reviews to provide users with more valuable information about their HCPs. The overall goal of this approach is to extend already existing business networks of HCPs by integrating connections that are newly discovered by our system. Our most recent evaluation results are promising: 70.8 % of the connections extracted from the reviews texts were correctly identified and in total 3,788 relations were recognized that have not been displayed in jameda.de’s network before.