Online Medical Consultation Service-Oriented Recommendations: Systematic Review

Area of Science:

• Health Informatics
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Information Systems

Background:

• Online health communities facilitate online medical consultations (OMCs), enabling remote physician-patient interactions.
• Challenges in OMCs include patient information overload and uneven physician workload distribution.
• OMC-oriented recommenders are crucial for addressing these challenges and improving e-service delivery.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the key paradigms driving the success of OMC-oriented recommendation systems.
• To identify factors influencing the effectiveness of recommendations in online medical consultation platforms.

Main Methods:

• A comprehensive literature search was conducted across major e-databases (PubMed, ACM, Springer, ScienceDirect) from January 2011 to December 2023.
• Included studies focused on healthcare-related recommendations for online services.
• 26 relevant articles were selected from 611 identified publications.

Main Results:

• Growing academic interest in OMC recommendations exists, but a consensus on e-service-oriented recommender definitions is lacking.
• Three critical factors for recommender success were identified: features, algorithms, and metrics.
• The study advocates for a shift from e-commerce to e-service-oriented recommenders, proposing a new theoretical framework and addressing two-sided personalization.

Conclusions:

• E-services, especially in knowledge-intensive fields like OMCs, necessitate interpretable recommendations for patients and workload management for physicians.
• Customizing personalized recommendations for OMCs is vital, considering the distinct cognitive abilities, decision-making, and preferences of both patients and physicians.
• A paradigm shift is needed to develop unique attributes and tailored content for two-sided user recommendations in OMCs.