A network-based method with privacy-preserving for identifying influential providers in large healthcare service systems

In data science, networks provide a useful abstraction of the structure of many complex systems, ranging from social systems and computer networks to biological networks and physical systems. Healthcare service systems are one of the main social systems that can also be understood using network-based approaches, for example, to identify and evaluate influential providers. In this paper, we propose a network-based method with privacy-preserving for identifying influential providers in large healthcare service systems. First, the provider-interacting network is constructed by employing publicly available information on locations and types of healthcare services of providers. Second, the ranking of nodes in the generated provider-interacting network is conducted in parallel on the basis of four nodal influence metrics. Third, the impact of the top-ranked influential nodes in the provider-interacting network is evaluated using three indicators. Compared with other research work based on patient-sharing networks, in this paper, the provider-interacting network of healthcare service providers can be roughly created according to the locations and the publicly available types of healthcare services, without the need for personally private electronic medical claims, thus protecting the privacy of patients. The proposed method is demonstrated by employing Physician and Other Supplier Data CY 2017, and can be applied to other similar datasets to help make decisions for the optimization of healthcare resources in the response to public health emergencies.