SHB: Small: Facilitating Mentoring in Peer Health Communities through Social Matching

通过对严重疾病的经历，患者在管理个人健康方面发展了大量的专业知识。当有经验的病人（“导师”）与第一次面临健康状况的个人分享他们的专业知识时，他们会发现这种帮助具有相当大的价值。同伴健康社区提供了这种“患者专业知识”的广泛基础，但人们可能会错过这种宝贵的资源，因为同伴指导通常很难获得，并且产生的建议不太适合个人情况或背景。本项目的工作重点是克服这一挑战，将社会匹配作为一种技术和智力框架，在在线卫生社区中连接同伴以获得指导。通过与在线癌症社区的合作，研究人员正在进行一系列的三项研究：(1)通过对自动文本提取与直接用户输入数据的对比研究，确定关键的师徒关系特征；(2)通过对癌症患者进行快速原型和可用性测试，开发连接同行师徒关系的工具；(3)通过基于社区的在线实地评估，评估同行师徒匹配的价值。这项研究的结果有望显著改善人们在面临健康问题时获得同伴帮助的方式。通过对患者支持需求的深入了解，本项目将利用丰富的在线社区数据，为患者量身定制合适的同伴导师推荐。这项工作广泛地促进了在线社区协作的知识，并将转化为其他患者服务，如面对面的支持小组。这些贡献是重要的，因为它们为患者提供了负担日益沉重的医疗保健系统的关键支持策略。在有共同情况的人之间进行配对，有助于新来者收集量身定制的见解，了解“期望什么”，并帮助那些有经验的人通过“回馈”分享他们宝贵的专业知识。因此，这项工作促进了我们目前对潜在过程的理解，并为未来的技术研究和开发提供了信息，这些技术通过增强同伴指导来增强公民的健康和福祉。

Through the experience of serious illness, patients develop substantial expertise about managing their personal health. When experienced patients ("mentors") share their expertise with individuals who are facing a health situation for the first time, they find considerable value is this help. Peer health communities offer a broad base of such "patient expertise", yet people can miss out on this valuable resource because, all too often, peer mentoring is difficult to obtain and yields advice that doesn't quite fit one's personal situation or context.The efforts within this project are focused on overcoming this challenge by applying social matching as a technical and intellectual framework for connecting peers for mentorship in online health communities. In partnership with an online cancer community, the investigators are conducting a series of three studies that: (1) Identifying critical mentorship characteristics through a comparative study of automated text extraction as contrasted with to direct user entry of data, (2) Developing tools that connect peers for mentorship through rapid prototyping and usability testing with cancer patients, and (3) Assessing the value of matching for peer mentoring through an online community-based field evaluation.The results from this research are expected to significantly improve the way people obtain peer help when faced with a health problem. Through a deeper understanding of patients' support needs, this project will use rich online community data to provide tailored recommendations of suitable peer mentors. This work advances knowledge of collaboration in online communities broadly and will translate to other patient services, such as face-to-face support groups. These contributions are significant because they offer patients crucial support strategies in an increasingly burdened healthcare system. Matchmaking among individuals with shared circumstances helps newcomers glean tailored insights into "what to expect" and helps those with experience to share their valuable expertise by "giving back". Thus, this work boosts our current understanding of the underlying processes and informs future research and development in technology that enhances the health and wellbeing of citizens by empowering peer mentorship.