  Online health communities (OHCs) offer the promise of connecting with
supportive peers. Forming these connections first requires finding relevant
peers - a process that can be time-consuming. Peer recommendation systems are a
computational approach to make finding peers easier during a health journey. By
encouraging OHC users to alter their online social networks, peer
recommendations could increase available support. But these benefits are
hypothetical and based on mixed, observational evidence. To experimentally
evaluate the effect of peer recommendations, we conceptualize these systems as
health interventions designed to increase specific beneficial connection
behaviors. In this paper, we designed a peer recommendation intervention to
increase two behaviors: reading about peer experiences and interacting with
peers. We conducted an initial feasibility assessment of this intervention by
conducting a 12-week field study in which 79 users of CaringBridge received
weekly peer recommendations via email. Our results support the usefulness and
demand for peer recommendation and suggest benefits to evaluating larger peer
recommendation interventions. Our contributions include practical guidance on
the development and evaluation of peer recommendation interventions for OHCs.
