Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Analytics for Sustainable Healthcare Systems

A special issue of Big Data and Cognitive Computing (ISSN 2504-2289). This special issue belongs to the section "Artificial Intelligence and Multi-Agent Systems".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 August 2026 | Viewed by 512

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Universidad de Granada, 18071 Granada, Spain
Interests: big data; generative AI; association rules
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Universidad de Granada, 18071 Granada, Spain
Interests: natural language processing; machine learning; generative AI; healthcare systems
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Sustainable healthcare increasingly depends on the effective use of large-scale medical, environmental, and operational data to support clinical, organisational, and public health decision-making. Advances in big data analytics, cognitive computing paradigms, and machine learning are creating new opportunities to design resilient, efficient, and equitable healthcare systems capable of adapting to demographic, environmental, and resource-based challenges.

This Special Issue, entitled “Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Analytics for Sustainable Healthcare Systems,” will highlight innovative research that integrates AI, health informatics, and data-driven computational methods to improve the sustainability of care delivery. We welcome research that leverages large, heterogeneous datasets, such as electronic health records, biomedical signals, imaging data, and environmental indicators, to enable predictive modelling, personalised medicine, and environmentally aware healthcare operations.

We encourage contributions addressing cognitive and intelligent computing approaches, interpretable and responsible AI, fairness-aware models, and the integration of data-driven systems into real clinical and public health workflows. Topics of interest include big data pipelines for healthcare, scalable machine learning for population health, intelligent decision support, AI-assisted epidemiological surveillance, the optimisation of medical resource allocation, and evaluations of the societal, economic, or ecological impacts of AI-enabled healthcare innovation.

This Special Issue will provide a multidisciplinary platform for advancing the development of sustainable, data-intensive, and human-centred healthcare systems.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

You may choose our Joint Special Issue in Sustainability.

Dr. Carlos Fernández-Basso
Dr. Andrea Morales-Garzón
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • big data analytics in healthcare
  • cognitive computing
  • health informatics
  • large language models (LLMs)
  • autonomous AI Agents
  • multi-agent systems
  • machine learning and deep learning
  • predictive modelling
  • responsible and explainable AI
  • electronic health records
  • clinical decision support
  • multimodal data integration
  • sustainable healthcare systems
  • environmental and population health data

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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31 pages, 380 KB  
Article
Hybrid Approach to Patient Review Classification at Scale: From Expert Annotations to Production-Ready Machine Learning Models for Sustainable Healthcare
by Irina Evgenievna Kalabikhina, Anton Vasilyevich Kolotusha and Vadim Sergeevich Moshkin
Big Data Cogn. Comput. 2026, 10(4), 114; https://doi.org/10.3390/bdcc10040114 - 9 Apr 2026
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Abstract
Patients leave millions of medical reviews annually, providing critical data for quality management. However, manual processing is infeasible, and existing systems fail to distinguish medical from organizational problems—a distinction essential for complaint routing. The consequences of misrouting are significant: clinical issues may go [...] Read more.
Patients leave millions of medical reviews annually, providing critical data for quality management. However, manual processing is infeasible, and existing systems fail to distinguish medical from organizational problems—a distinction essential for complaint routing. The consequences of misrouting are significant: clinical issues may go unaddressed when medical complaints reach administrative staff, while systemic service problems remain unresolved when organizational complaints reach medical directors. We developed a hybrid approach combining expert annotation with Large Language Models (LLMs). Fifteen prompt iterations on 1500 reviews with expert validation (modified Cohen’s kappa (κ_mod), which weights errors hierarchically, reached 0.745) preceded the LLM annotation of 15,000 mixed-sentiment and positive reviews. These were combined with 7417 expert-annotated negative reviews to form a corpus of 22,417 reviews. Eight architectures, ranging from Logistic Regression to a BERT + TF-IDF + LightGBM ensemble, were compared using both standard metrics and domain-specific practical metrics tailored to complaint routing. The best model, scaled to 4.3 million Russian-language reviews from the Prodoctorov.ru platform, achieved 92.9% Practical Accuracy—the proportion of reviews classified without critical medical–organizational misclassification errors (M ↔ O)—compared to 68.0% standard accuracy, which treats all errors equally. Critical errors were reduced to 1.4%, yielding 144,000 more correctly processed complaints than traditional methods (TF-IDF + Logistic Regression). Analysis of the scaled data revealed the following: 46.1% M (medical), 21.0% O (organizational), and 32.9% C (combined) reviews; medical ratings were highest (4.75 vs. 4.59 for organizational, p < 0.001); combined reviews were longest (802 characters); zero-star reviews comprised 3.8% of feedback, with organizational complaints dominating (38.2%) among extreme negatives; and average ratings rose by 1.24 points over 14 years. This hybrid approach yields expert-comparable corpora, automates 93% of feedback processing, ensures correct complaint routing, and contributes to healthcare sustainability by reducing administrative burden, accelerating resolution, and enabling data-driven quality management without proportional increases in human resources. All analyses were conducted on Russian-language patient reviews. Full article
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