Role Shifts and Engagement Patterns in an Ovarian Cancer Online Health Community

This study explores how ovarian cancer (OvCa) patients and caregivers engage with online health communities (OHCs), offering insights to address the cold-start problem in health recommender systems. Analyzing 909 initial posts and 14,816 comments from the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition (NOCC) forum, we examined how users’ contributions evolve over time. Initial interactions typically center on emotional support and personal experience sharing, while more advanced engagement, such as advice and referrals, emerge later as users gain more domain knowledge. We introduce a novel “start position” metric to identify when users begin providing each support type. Our results reveal distinct progression patterns and emphasize the importance of dynamic user modeling to reflect users’ evolving knowledge and roles. These findings inform the design of OvCa-specific recommender system, which our team develops with support of the National Library of Medicine.