Abstract:
Chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection leads to varying degrees of liver damage, and poor patient visits behaviour patterns predispose to disease progression, but there is a lack of exploration based on real-world data. The consultation data of a total of 44,919 patients with chronic hepatitis B from seven hospitals in Chongqing from 2007 to 2021 were studied and categorized according to their past histories into five types of chronic hepatitis B patients suffering from hypertension, hepatitis, tuberculosis, coronary artery disease, and diabetes with five types of past histories. According to the time series of patients' visits, three important indicators of human behavioural dynamics, namely interval distribution, burstiness and memory, were used to analyze patients' visit behaviours. The results showed that the intervals of consultation behaviours in the population of chronic hepatitis B patients with different past histories were power-law distributed, and had strong burstiness and weak memory. Burstiness of patient visit behaviour were associated with adverse progression dynamics associated with HBV infection, i.e., the more severe the disease, the lower the burstiness. Understanding patient visit behaviour from the perspective of complex systems provides theoretical support for further exploring the association between patient visit behaviour patterns and adverse disease progression status.