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

通过严重疾病的经历，患者在管理个人健康方面积累了大量的专业知识。当有经验的患者(“导师”)与第一次面临健康状况的人分享他们的专业知识时，他们发现这种帮助具有相当大的价值。同伴健康社区提供了广泛的“患者专业知识”，但人们可能会错过这一宝贵的资源，因为同伴指导往往很难获得，所产生的建议不太适合个人情况或环境。该项目的努力集中在克服这一挑战上，将社会匹配作为在线健康社区中联系同伴进行指导的技术和智力框架。与在线癌症社区合作，研究人员正在进行一系列三项研究：(1)通过对比自动文本提取和直接用户输入数据来确定关键的指导特征，(2)开发工具，通过快速原型和癌症患者的可用性测试来连接同伴进行指导，以及(3)通过基于在线社区的现场评估来评估匹配对同伴指导的价值。这项研究的结果预计将显著改善人们在面临健康问题时获得同伴帮助的方式。通过更深入地了解患者的支持需求，该项目将利用丰富的在线社区数据，为合适的同伴导师提供量身定做的推荐。这项工作广泛地提高了在线社区中的协作知识，并将转化为其他患者服务，如面对面的支持小组。这些贡献意义重大，因为它们在负担日益沉重的医疗体系中为患者提供了至关重要的支持策略。在情况相同的人之间牵线搭桥，有助于新来者收集量身定做的洞察力，以“期待什么”，并帮助那些有经验的人通过“回馈”来分享他们宝贵的专业知识。因此，这项工作增进了我们目前对基本过程的理解，并为未来通过增强同伴指导能力来增强公民健康和福祉的技术研究和开发提供了信息。

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.