Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

1-1-2021

Journal / Book Title

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

Abstract

Overprescription of opioid pain relievers is a known contributor to the growing opioid epidemic. Identification of medical providers that engage in overprescription has proven challenging. We examine the utility of physician rating websites (PRWs) as potential sources of data that may help identify overprescribing practices. We leverage text mining techniques to identify linguistic cues that are associated with known cases of overprescription. We find that patients flag potentially problematic medical providers in their reviews and suggest that intervention by authorities is warranted. Our study contributes to the growing body of literature on medical infoveillance by identifying patients' appeals to regulatory authorities as an important type of social signal for regulatory monitoring.

DOI

10.24251/hicss.2021.478

Rights

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync-nd/4.0/).

Published Citation

Mamonov, S. (2021). Blowing the whistle on opioid overprescription: Insights from patient feedback on physician rating websites. In 54th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2021 (pp. 3944-3953). IEEE Computer Society.

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