We partner with a leading European healthcare provider and design a mechanism to match patients with family doctors in primary care. We define the matchmaking process for several distinct use cases given different levels of available information about patients. Then, we adopt a hybrid recommender system to present each patient a list of family doctor recommendations. In particular, we model patient trust of family doctors using a large-scale dataset of consultation histories, while accounting for the temporal dynamics of their relationships. Our proposed approach shows higher predictive accuracy than both a heuristic baseline and a collaborative filtering approach, and the proposed trust measure further improves model performance.

We propose a collaborative filtering recommender system to match patients with doctors in primary care. In particular, we model patient trust in primary care doctors using a large-scale dataset of consultation histories, and account for the temporal dynamics of their relationships, defined in a novel quantitative measure of patient-doctor trust. Our proposed approach shows higher predictive accuracy than a heuristic baseline, as well as a collaborative filtering approach without the trust measures.