Personal health record system based on social network analysis

In this paper, a health social network-based PHR model denoted as HSN-PHR (Health Social Network-based Personal Health Record), is proposed as an extended version of the integrated PHR model that benefits social network analysis to model the consumers’ relationships. The proposed PHR model has benefits of all existing PHR models and more compliance with PHR definition. The HSN-PHR is a heterogeneous network with three main entities (including consumers, healthcare providers, and service provider entities) and various types of relationships. Validity of the HSN-PHR is investigated through its structural analysis. Based on consumers’ requirements, four networks named “Feature-mix”, “Social-family”, “Social-doctor” and “Social-lab” were constructed separately concerning four relationships including profile information similarity, family relationships, refer to same doctor or laboratory. Some social network features such as assortativity, transitivity, clustering coefficient, the number of communities, average shortest path and degree distribution were compared to Wiki-vote, Facebook and a small-world network. The results of social network analysis show that the assortativity coefficient in Feature-mix network was positive and greater than other HSN-PHR networks. The degree distribution diagram for Facebook, Wiki-Vote, and Social-lab was similar to the exponential diagram, while this diagram for Feature-mix, Social-doctor, Social-family and small-word network was similar to the normal distribution diagram. The proposed HSN-PHR provides the capabilities of serving as a PHR for the users. Developing such a social network improves consumers’ relationships through a platform for propagating health information, news, and consumer education. Moreover, structural features analysis results in the examination of meeting the users’ requirements more efficiently.