Doctors aren’t immune to the lure of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube, to name just a few popular sites. But are healthcare providers fully tapping the power of these ubiquitous social media outlets? Some tech-savvy physicians say their peers could do much more online from a professional perspective, and even a small investment in social media can generate significant returns.
Kevin Pho, M.D., known as “social media’s leading physician voice,” says there are tremendous upsides for physicians using social media on a professional level. He points to patient education, boosting online reputations, and making your voice heard, as three specific examples.
By Neal Learner, Contributing Writer
If you’re considering entering the world of social media — or if you want to improve your current effort — you’d be wise to heed the advice of two who are doing it right.
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Doctors aren’t immune to the lure of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube, to name just a few popular sites. But are healthcare providers fully tapping the power of these ubiquitous social media outlets? Some tech-savvy physicians say their peers could do much more online from a professional perspective, and even a small investment in social media can generate significant returns.
Kevin Pho, M.D., known as “social media’s leading physician voice,” says there are tremendous upsides for physicians using social media on a professional level. He points to patient education, boosting online reputations, and making your voice heard, as three specific examples.
Educating Patients
More patients than ever are going online to research health information, but sometimes the information they find isn’t the most reliable. “Physicians have a fantastic opportunity to use various social media platforms to help correct inaccurate information or to provide interpretation to some of the information that patients are reading online,” Pho says.
Boosting Online Reputation
Patients are not only researching health information online, they’re researching their physician as well. “They’re Googling their doctor before seeing them,” Pho says. “If physicians have an active social media presence, these platforms can rank high in Google searches and could be a way for physicians to define themselves online rather than getting defined by a physician rating site.”
Making Your Voice Heard
As healthcare undergoes historic transformation, getting the physician’s perspective into the mix has become particularly important. “Healthcare reform is a very polarizing topic, and sometimes physicians’ voices aren’t included in the health policy discussions,” Pho explains. “By using social media, physicians can share their experiences and opinions, and hopefully their input will be heard by those policy decision makers.”
While these are all important uses of social media, Pho says doctors shouldn’t feel compelled to jump in without a clear objective in mind. On the other hand, he advises every doctor at the very least to have an online presence. As a first step, Pho recommends simply creating a profile on a professional social network. His favorites are LinkedIn and Doximity, an online social networking service for U.S. physicians. “A profile on one of these sites is no more than a digital translation of one’s resume,” he says. “So creating a profile here should take no more than 1 to 2 hours.”
Time spent on social media after that can range from a few hours to dozens of hours per week, says Pho, founder and editor of the KevinMD.com blog and a prolific tweeter to his more than 130,000 Twitter followers. It depends on an individual physician’s goals. “Is it because they want to educate patients?” he notes as an example. “Do they want to connect and learn from colleagues? Is it because they want to advocate for a cause? Is it because they want to debate healthcare reform?”
Return On Social Media Investment
Linda Girgis, M.D., a family physician in New Jersey, spends about an hour a day posting sometimes dozens of tweets to her nearly 29,000 Twitter followers. While the tweets span a wide range of health-related issues, many also promote Girgis’ essays and books, and she feels the time investment is well worth it. “Other forms of marketing I have used in the past have cost much more — thousands of dollars — with little result,” she says.
The investment also pays off in attracting new patients. “Most of the public is on social media, so doctors who fail to market here are losing a big resource for potential business,” she says. “Many doctors have acquired new patients through the use of social media.” Because of its ubiquity, social media is good place to make practice announcements. “For example, you could use it to announce fl u shots are in,” Girgis explains. “I personally find investing time in social media actually cuts down time in other tasks.”
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Pho says additional return on investment comes from the ability to disseminate important and accurate health information to large groups of people, with Facebook and Twitter well-suited for this effort. YouTube is another social media option for physicians, especially those not comfortable writing. Doctors already give patient advice every day, and videos are simply an extension of that.
Some hospitals have actively embraced the value of social media. Th e Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, for example, makes social media engagement part of the physicians’ workflow. “At Mayo, we believe individuals have the right and responsibility to advocate for their own health, and it’s our responsibility to help them use social networking tools to get the best information and connect with providers as well as one another,” the center’s website notes.
Avoiding The Pitfalls
Formal social media policies are crucial to help keep physicians and other providers in bounds because, with the ease of electronic communications and potential of social media to facilitate a more engaged doctor-patient relationship, come well-known dangers.
Girgis cautions physicians not to communicate one-on-one with patients in social media because of HIPAA concerns. Pho agrees, saying, “I always say social media is a great way to talk to patients as a group, but not to patients individually. I don’t recommend physicians use social media to provide diagnosis to individual patients. But when it comes to educating groups of patients about vaccines or the latest health studies, I think it’s an excellent platform.”
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Similarly, both Pho and Girgis advise doctors not to “friend” patients on Facebook. Rather, physicians should create a professional page that is open to the public, while keeping their personal Facebook page with photos of vacations and their children’s birthday parties private.
In 2010, the American Medical Association added ethical guidance on professionalism in the use of social media to the AMA Code of Medical Ethics. This includes calls for physicians to:
- Be cognizant of standards of patient privacy and confidentiality that must be maintained in all environments, including online, and refrain from posting identifiable patient information online;
- Maintain appropriate boundaries of the patient-physician relationship online in accordance with professional ethical guidelines, just as they would in any other context;
- Alert a colleague who posts material that appears unprofessional, so that they can remove it and/or take other appropriate actions; and
- Report the matter to appropriate authorities if the behavior significantly violates professional norms and the individual does not take appropriate action to resolve the situation.
Pho says most social media policies are based on common sense and reinforce the notion that doctors should be as professional online as they are in a room face-to-face with a patient.
“You could read social media policies that can be dozens of pages, but what it really comes down to is to be professional,” he says. “Frankly, we deal with a lot of sensitive information that can be revealed online. If we are careful with what we say, most of us will be OK.”
For More Information
To view Drs. Girgis’ and Pho’s online presence, visit www.drlinda-md.com and www.kevinmd.com respectively.
Pho says additional return on investment comes from the ability to disseminate important and accurate health information to large groups of people, with Facebook and Twitter well-suited for this effort. YouTube is another social media option for physicians, especially those not comfortable writing. Doctors already give patient advice every day, and videos are simply an extension of that.
Similarly, both Pho and Girgis advise doctors not to “friend” patients on Facebook. Rather, physicians should create a professional page that is open to the public, while keeping their personal Facebook page with photos of vacations and their children’s birthday parties private.
