Dissecting Medical Referral Mechanisms in Health Services: Role of Physician Professional Networks
This research addresses the problem of improving healthcare collaboration and management for patients and providers, but it is incremental as it applies existing GNN methods to a new domain-specific dataset.
This paper tackled the problem of understanding how professional networks among physicians influence medical referrals from primary to specialist care, finding that doctors' social connections can predict referrals using Graph Neural Network models on five-year Portuguese health data.
Medical referrals between primary care physicians (PC) and specialist care (SC) physicians profoundly impact patient care regarding quality, satisfaction, and cost. This paper investigates the influence of professional networks among medical doctors on referring patients from PC to SC. Using five-year consultation data from a Portuguese private health provider, we conducted exploratory data analysis and constructed both professional and referral networks among physicians. We then apply Graph Neural Network (GNN) models to learn latent representations of the referral network. Our analysis supports the hypothesis that doctors' professional social connections can predict medical referrals, potentially enhancing collaboration within organizations and improving healthcare services. This research contributes to dissecting the underlying mechanisms in primary-specialty referrals, thereby providing valuable insights for enhancing patient care and effective healthcare management.