Some physicians may be hesitant to participate in social media outlets, like Facebook and Twitter.
Well, get over it.
Great post by pediatrician Bryan Vartabedian who addresses this topic. Indeed, physicians have lost control of the online message, especially with, according to recent data, 60+ percent of patients visiting the web first when looking for health information.
Instead, anti-vaccine proponents and homeopaths have embraced the Internet, and now exert tremendous influence on patients. We doctors have no one to blame but ourselves for being so slow to get online. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*
Ed Bennett is the Director of Web Strategy at the University of Maryland Medical System and the real expert of how hospitals use social media. He has just published his recent slideshow focusing on this issue.
From health privacy to the ethical obligation of doctors to be visible on Twitter, the panel-based dialog at Blog World Expo raised as many questions as answers.Medical professionals in the online space face remarkable challenges, especially with regard to transparency, personal boundaries, and the definition of patient privacy.It’s clear that our technology is ahead of our legal and ethical dialog. Read more »
Last night, I saw a commercial produced by the federal government. Called “Questions are the Answer,” it’s a call for patients to be engaged in their medical care, to ask questions of their doctors in order to be sure of their medical condition.
The commercial was excellent – it showed a man asking dozens of increasingly arcane questions about a cell phone he was thinking of buying. Then, it showed him in his doctor’s office, apparently after getting a diagnosis. “Do you have any questions?” the doctor asks. “Nope,” says the man.
The government agency that produced the commercial is the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. There are a series of other videos and tools that can help you be a better, more informed consumer if you get sick.
The only catch: it’s almost impossible to find any of this great material. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at See First Blog*
When University of Louisville nursing student Nina Yoder blogged about her experience watching a patient give birth in a post entitled “How I Witnessed the Miracle of Life,” she may have thought she was just blowing off some steam. Well her school saw things very differently.
When school officials read Yoder’s post, which included a description of the baby as a “creep” and “a wrinkly, bluish creature, all Picasso-like and weird, ugly as hell, covered in god knows what, screeching and waving its tentacles in the air,” they moved to expel her from school by calling her into an office, searching her for weapons (apparently because Yoder had separately blogged about her support for the Second Amendment), and informing her she was no longer enrolled at the school. Read more »
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