A deep learning and clustering-based topic consistency modeling framework for matching health information supply and demand

Improving health literacy through health information dissemination is one of the most economical and effective mechanisms for improving population health. This process needs to fully accommodate the thematic suitability of health information supply and demand and reduce the impact of information overload and supply–demand mismatch on the enthusiasm of health information acquisition. We propose a health information topic modeling analysis framework that integrates deep learning methods and clustering techniques to model the supply-side and demand-side topics of health information and to quantify the thematic alignment of supply and demand. To validate the effectiveness of the framework, we have conducted an empirical analysis on a dataset with 90,418 pieces of textual data from two prominent social networking platforms. The results show that the supply of health information in general has not yet met the demand, the demand for health information has not yet been met to a considerable extent, especially for disease-related topics, and there is clear inconsistency between the supply and demand sides for the same health topics. Public health policy-making departments and content producers can adjust their information selection and dissemination strategies according to the distribution of identified health topics, thereby improving the effectiveness of public health information dissemination.