By Coco
Common knowledge: one of the most popular online activities for Americans is researching healthcare information. Millions flock online each month to learn why their head hurts, their toes crack when they walk, or their hair is turning green. In today’s social media universe, these millions are being fed more information than ever from a vast variety of sources — sure, many of them questionable — but many are actual surgeons, physicians and general practitioners, all discussing their areas of expertise a with fever.
Modernmedicine.com, way back in s2004, wrote an article about how physicians are beginning to get “lots of mileage” from blogs. Despite its age, it’s a solid story about the healthcare industry as a leader in social media and the Internet overall. Sites like WebMD.com are massively popular (touting millions of visitors a month), and picked up on the notion of social media and user-generated content long ago. The “Blogs A-Z” section has scores of physician blogs. Under “Community” WebMD also offers a full-scale “Join the Discussion” section.
But in terms of the healthcare professional’s online presence, WebMD is just the tip of the iceberg. NPR reported last month that there are at least 120,000 healthcare blogs alone. It’s tough to nail down how many of those are physician-specific blogs, but those are an easy find.
This raises the same question for healthcare companies that companies in other industries are asking themselves as well: “Should we blog?” The answer is even more complicated for healthcare industry than it is for other industries for a good reason reasons: patient confidentiality and regulatory issues.
Two weeks ago, YNT wrote a piece about the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) navigation of sensitive issues in order to blog quite successfully. The point I am trying to make in this piece is largely the same. No one expects a physician blogger to talk specifically about Edith, the delightful hypochondriac who lives in Bangor, Maine. Physicians, surgeons and others have plenty to say about the healthcare profession as a whole, without mentioning specific patients by name or identifying characteristics.
Or look at it this way: Patient confidentiality should not hinder physicians from writing their own blogs any more than client confidentiality should keep me from posting to the YNT blog. YNT bloggers could write about the inner-workings of all our clients businesses — if we wanted to get fired or just be dastardly people in general. But conversely, each YNT contributor has their own personal bent and interest in social media and a desire to share that information with others — and here we are approaching our fiftieth post in less than ninety days.
To lift another point from the NPR article (which I strongly encourage you to read), Dr. Kevin Pho, who pens the “Kevin, M.D. blog” says, “I talk a lot about primary care because there’s a myriad of problems that I as a primary care physician face that I want to communicate to the public. I talk about malpractice and how physicians practice defensive medicine to avoid malpractice lawsuits.” This perfectly illustrates why physicians need not fear blogging. The issues Pho writes about present no confidentiality problems, and thousands find him interesting enough to read his blog monthly.
Healthcare providers have so much to offer online. Proof being, valuable information is being offered online already. Joining the conversation may just turn your blue heart to red.