Exploring patient-patient interactions graphs by network analysis

Abstract

Understanding how patient demographics and shared experiences impact interactions is essential for strengthening pa/tient support networks and optimizing health outcomes as personalized healthcare becomes more and more important. To this end, this study explores the patient-patient interactions (PPIs) graph as a network and applies selected network analysis approaches to examine the PPIs network of accutane drug. Two main research questions are addressed by gaining deeper insight at the hidden patterns of reactivity and connectivity among interchanging nodes. There was a negative response to the first research question, which asked if patients react to others that have similar gender and/or age profiles in a consistent way. Patients tended to interact with people of different genders and ages, indicating a high degree of heterogeneity in the network. Negative responses were likewise given to the second research question, which asked if communities inside the network could identify patients based on gender or age profile. Network analysis approaches for community detection failed to distinguish between groups with similar demographic characteristics. Rather, groups seemed to emerge based on other factors, like similarity in patient opinions. The results imply that gender and age do not have a major influence on community membership. Future research will concentrate on applying more sophisticated graph mining techniques to expand these approaches to cover more and larger PPIs networks.