Physicans and Patients Connecting on Facebook?

One of my first faculty social media skeptics sent me this wonderful article from the New England Journal of Medicine. In the article a doctor talks about the perception versus the reality of physicians who connect with their patients on Facebook. Dr. Jain starts out by describing the initial "anxiety felt about crossing boundaries" as an "an old problem in clinical medicine but it has taken a different shape as it has migrated to this new medium."

I think that this is an emotion that any professional in any discipline feels when considering social media use. When it comes down to it we all have a life outside of our profession, and not everyone is comfortable mixing those worlds. Many of our relationships at work are very surface in nature. We ask about the kids or what the weekend has in store as a courtesy. How much of your life do you really want to share with coworkers or patients? What if your opinions, affiliations or extracurricular activities are not popular or comfortable to discuss outside of your circle of friends and family? Do you censor yourself?

This may be even more daunting for physicians. "During medical training, the importance of maintaining professional distance — however much one desires to have a close, meaningful relationship with one's patients — is taught by educators and reinforced by the use of beepers and paging services meant to shield physicians from their patients." So how does a physician participate in conversations with their patients while still maintain a safe distance?

At my hospital I have the pleasure of working with a one very creative physician who has decided to create a fan page. (See his fan page) He wants to be available on Facebook and share information without opening his personal presence to patients. We don't know yet if this is the right answer but it does allow him the freedom to try Facebook for patient interaction with a little more control over the level of interaction.

I think it is too soon to tell if there is any real danger of adding patients as fans on Facebook, but it seems that the perceived danger has felt real enough to keep many physicians from embracing it fully. If the fan page approach turns out to have benefit to our faculty member we will post the results either to this blog or to the blog for the hospital.

Getting the Physicians on Board

Early on in the process I realized that in order to make content both authentic and representative of the hospital, I would need to get the physicians on board. In the beginning it was tough. I would call and e-mail and harass their admin's to try and get them on camera for a quick video, or get them to sit still long enough for a 15 minute podcast recording. It was not unusual for me to get no call back, or a no show's on the appointments set by admins.

My one saving grace was that I am a part of the external communications team. The physicians are used to getting calls from other members of the team asking them to do interviews for traditional media. I leaned quite a bit on my colleagues for help in figuring out which physicians were the most media friendly, tech savvy, or just plain nice. Sometimes if physician had a breaking story or research coming out they would just book them into a session with me at the same time they were booking their traditional media interview schedule, the physicians just thought they were coming to do another interview.

So every time we got an opportunity we

• Made it an easy, and comfortable experience
• Made the process flexible, accommodating to their schedules and streamlined so that it took as little of their time as possible
• During set up answered the questions about the value of this project for them and their program
• Offered the content up to them for use on their department web page

One interview at a time, we eventually began to develop a reputation for becoming a service, instead of a chore. We started to get phone calls from administrators asking for our help in finding opportunities for further exposure for the programs through social media. We are finally to the point where it is not as difficult to get them to participate, if they can find the time.

A year ago I had maybe one physician who was really engaged in social media, and participating willingly. Today I have a solid handful or real success stories.

Here are a few examples of our Physicians using social media at my hospital

Dr. Anas Younes
Facebook
Twitter
Blog
Video

Dr. Raymond DuBois
Twitter
Blog

Dr. Michael Fisch
Blog
Video

Dr. Oliver Bogler
Twitter
Blog

Supporting Web Savvy Physicians

with Web Portals & Social Media Communications

I am not a physician, however I do work with them. From what I gather, they are people who enjoy ease and convenience as much as anyone. If they are comfortable with technology then they are not adverse to using it to improve their practice. The hospital that I work for has a physician portal that assists physicians who have chosen to refer their patients to our specialists.


The portal enhances continuity of care and reduces referring physician workload by offering

- Faster referral processing
- Access to transcribed reports
- Single point of contact for patient information
- Access to more data & more reports on their treatment

and they are even working on bringing EMR access to the portal in the next few weeks.

We thought that the physicians that use social media might be the same physicians who are comfortable with technology and using it to help them in their daily tasks. So as a work group project, a few of us decided to try and implement a communications plan, with a heavy social media emphasis. Our hope was that if we could raise awareness of the portal among "those physicians" we could in turn use the robust analytics that social media and web analytics provides prove the impact of social media communications in the business of health care.

So we:

• Stepped up our efforts on Twitter
• Created a FaceBook page for the portal page
• Made a few Videos
• Made some blogger outreach efforts

I really believe that this type of honest 2-way communication between hospital and community physician can benefit both parties. Soon we will be collecting the data behind the project and let the analytics tell the story. I will be sure to let you know how it all turns out.