Applications of Social Network Construction and Analysis in the Medical Referral Process

The application of social network analysis (SNA) and mining in health care domains has recently received a considerable attention for its key role in understanding how doctors form communities, and how they are socially connected with each other. This understanding helps enhance organizational structures and process flows. In this paper, we show how SNA techniques can solve issues in the medical referral system by analyzing the social network of general practitioners (GPs) and specialists (SPs) associated with a medical referral system in the Canadian healthcare system and the like. Various SNA and mining procedures are proposed backed by experimental results.