Online Healthcare Solutions

People consult a physician for their illness. But, most of the people search for information about their illness on the web. They search for people who have had similar type of illness and the treatments they have undergone and the effectiveness of the treatments. This work describes the methodology using which information about treatments which are effective for a disease queried by a user is mined from various health related forums and given to the end user in a consolidated form, especially about the disease Psoriasis. Since most of the data is in text form and in English, Natural Language Processing techniques and various classifier algorithms are used for identifying treatments posted on online health care forums which are effective for the disease Psoriasis. In the first stage a search engine is developed for information retrieval. The search engine searches for web pages from various social networking sites containing information, messages and comments about the disease and a corpus is created. Here web mining technology plays a significant role for information extraction.