"Minha Saude" a healthcare social network for patients with cardiovascular diseases

Many patients use the Internet to find information that can improve their health conditions. In this context, Health Social Networks are acquiring greater force in people\´s lives by offering them opportunities for social networking to expose questions, experiences, besides new treatments and seek to form relationships giving or receiving emotional support. We developed a Healthcare Social Network called "Minha Saude", a virtual environment that facilitates contact between patients with cardiovascular problems with the goal to promote actions related to social inclusion of people involved. Through a called "Care Plan" available in the Social Network, we tried to motivate patients to get more interest in their own care. Daily activities, emotional states, symptoms and situations will be provided by the patient in the system through any device with internet connection. This information will be used to visualize the progress of patient\´s health and can be used to make medical decisions as needed. Also, we distinguish an important fact related to the Care Plan, which is the inter-relationship between patients with similar characteristics, we found it important to this action that patients can feed back their experiences and this fact can serve as motivation for them to adhere more their treatments. For this, we developed an algorithm following a Content-plus-link approach for friendship recommendation between those patients who share similar interests and thus increase the level of collaboration and communication between them. This recommendation is based on data from clinical profile, health status, interests and possible previously existing connections. The results are promising about to use of the Care Plan module and the recommendations that were accepted by the participants to create friendship.