Assessing Unmet Information Needs of Breast Cancer Survivors: Exploratory Study of Online Health Forums Using Text Classification and Retrieval

Background Patient education materials given to breast cancer survivors may not be a good fit for their information needs. Needs may change over time, be forgotten, or be misreported, for a variety of reasons. An automated content analysis of survivors' postings to online health forums can identify expressed information needs over a span of time and be repeated regularly at low cost. Identifying these unmet needs can guide improvements to existing education materials and the creation of new resources. Objective The primary goals of this project are to assess the unmet information needs of breast cancer survivors from their own perspectives and to identify gaps between information needs and current education materials. Methods This approach employs computational methods for content modeling and supervised text classification to data from online health forums to identify explicit and implicit requests for health-related information. Potential gaps between needs and education materials are identified using techniques from information retrieval. Results We provide a new taxonomy for the classification of sentences in online health forum data. 260 postings from two online health forums were selected, yielding 4179 sentences for coding. After annotation of data and training alternative one-versus-others classifiers, a random forest-based approach achieved F1 scores from 66% (Other, dataset2) to 90% (Medical, dataset1) on the primary information types. 136 expressions of need were used to generate queries to indexed education materials. Upon examination of the best two pages retrieved for each query, 12% (17/136) of queries were found to have relevant content by all coders, and 33% (45/136) were judged to have relevant content by at least one. Conclusions Text from online health forums can be analyzed effectively using automated methods. Our analysis confirms that breast cancer survivors have many information needs that are not covered by the written documents they typically receive, as our results suggest that at most a third of breast cancer survivors’ questions would be addressed by the materials currently provided to them.