Physician, Tweet Thyself May 20, 2013 San Francisco Medicine, SFMS Member, Technology Kim Newell, physician twitter, social media 0 By Kim Newell, MD Our patients are getting overloaded with health information from more and more sources, and yet they often don’t get to the right answer. Recent studies have shown that more than 98% of the online health-related discussions take place without the input of a health care professional. How do we make sure that we remain an integral part of our patient’s health care conversations? As a pediatrician in an increasingly complex health care delivery system, in which I must provide more care with higher levels of service to increasingly savvy patients in less time, I have begun to turn to technology, the Internet, and especially social media to help me do my job better. There are many compelling reasons that I am active in social media. Social media makes me more efficient: I save time (and my voice) by sending my patients to my website to learn about why their child has green poop or how to tame their diaper rash. Social media strengthens my connection with my patients: As I write about my joys and foibles in parenting, I become more human, which actually increases my authority with patients. Social media keeps me up to date: Twitter is now my primary source for news about pediatrics, parenting, and health care policy. Twitter is an information accelerator, and there I get health news hot off the press. It has become the most efficient way for me to keep up both with scientific literature and with the popular media's take on health news (which my patients are reading). Social media helps me network: Twitter has allowed me to interact with peers and colleagues in ways not previously possible. Just today I conversed with new contacts in three different states about an infant’s undiagnosed GI issue, and then watched a fascinating webcast about social media and health care put on by my own organization that I learned about on Twitter. Through Twitter I have also been asked to write a forward to a parenting book and advise a start-up company on a new mobile health product. Social media gives me a voice in the sea of health information: Through my blog and Twitter I give scientific, evidence-based, timely and practical guidance on child health and parenting. Without physicians involved, this discussion can be unbalanced. When Jenny McCarthy claims that vaccines are unhealthy for our children on the Oprah Winfrey show and Donald Trump chimes in to agree, we have to get involved in the conversation—otherwise, the conversation is dominated by tweets like this on about the “dangers” of vaccines. There was a time when we physicians didn’t have to compete for our patients’ attention—we were the one voice in the room. I believe that the core of our healing still happens one on one, with patients in our examining rooms. However, we must also begin to meet our patients where they are: on their smartphones and tablets and computers, doing research and engaging in discussions on Twitter and Facebook and in the blogosphere. There’s a conversation going on. About health. If you’re not active in social media, your voice as a physician, a scientist, a healer, and an advocate is likely to be drowned out. In the end, the key is not in the technology or the tweets: It is in the trust that we build with patients. We, as a medical community, must figure out how to be not only a part of the health-related conversations happening in social media but also to lead those discussions. We can and must use these channels to combat misinformation, promote health, and engage the trust of our patients. This article originally appeared in the May 2013 issue of San Francisco Medicine. Dr. Kim Newell is a general pediatrician at Kaiser Permanente and a member of the SFMS board. She began to learn about technology and medicine upon moving to San Francisco for residency at UCSF and is now a technology lead at Kaiser, where she also teaches a class about vaccine safety for parents and helps lead an innovative obesity management program. She tweets at @drkimmd and sometimes blogs at drkimmd.com. Comments are closed.
