There’s been a fair amount of buzz in the medical blogosphere lately, about medical blogs dying out.
Though that seems premature, it raises concerns among the lawsuit-leery medical community, about starting to blog and podcast. One blogger who went offline was involved in litigation, and was commenting on matters pertaining to the case. Another stated it was just a matter of time before attorneys hunt down the anonymous subjects of medical blogs, and pursue them for legal action.
What is a medical blogger or podcaster to do?
First, there’s a basic difference between medical podcasting and blogging (henceforth “P&B”) for outreach among the medical community, and for outreach to current and prospective patients. While the former definitely has its place, it is fraught with personal liability exposure risks — primarily, that patient details you P&B about could be traced back to your particular patient, and you as their caregiver.
It Could Happen To Anyone With A Pocket As Deep As Yours
If you think that’s unlikely, remember that anything you post on the Internet can be dissected by anyone else on the planet with computer access. This includes attorneys who’d like nothing better than to earn a 30+% commission on hundreds of thousands of dollars of damages (or a million plus on a big case). It of course includes your patients — and your patients’ friends, relatives, and coworkers.
Disguising the details of the case may or may not work, if you include enough information to make the story meaningful. And once it’s out on the Internet, it’s waaaay out.
You can limit your discussion to physician-only sites, like Sermo, or deliberately be vague and general on your publicly accessible site. But that seriously limits your audience or dilutes your message, which you may ultimately choose to do.
I’m partial to what I call “the billboard test”: if you’d hesitate to put your name in boldface on an airport concourse billboard, and the content of your post as the billboard itself, then don’t do it. There are folks out there who’d marry a serial killer in prison, sight unseen, and there are folks who’d have a decent crack at finding out who you and the patient you’re talking about are, “detail changing” or not.
Promoting Your Practice, Thankfully, Is Different
In that case, you WANT your readers to know who you are — in fact, you really hope they recognize you, your office’s location, hours of operation, offered services, etc. You’d be thrilled to pieces if your name reflexively leaps to their lips for anything medically related.
You are, in fact, marketing your practice and your self.
As such, your content should put your best, most appealing foot forward. You are giving people reasons to pick you as their healthcare provider, or to stay with you if they’re existing patients.
The focus, in medical practice marketing as in blog marketing, must be on giving value to your patients, not a catharsis for yourself. Your patients will return to your P&B because of content that helps them, that gives hope to them, that educates and informs them.
Examples of such content would be medical news excerpts from national news agencies or MedScape, announcements of local health faires or flu shot clinics, and informational articles on cancer screening and weight loss. Blog and podcast content can still be edgy, but only in the service of getting folks to think more carefully about their health care.
Don’t forget that the majority of your audience will be your existing patients, who know a surprising amount about you, the other patients in the waiting room, and can put 2 and 2 together as well as anyone else. A second litmus test may help you screen your content: Is it something you’d hesitate to broadcast over the office intercom on a busy day?
You already know that some topics are taboo to discuss outside the exam room, in the hallway where any passing patient (and sometimes staff member) could hear it. Your blog is kind of like that, multiplied by about 5 billion.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Yes, Peter, the power of networking is exponential. This was illustrated in the 1960’s, when one of the founders of the internet had formulated that if you have ‘N’ computers all linked up, and by adding one more computer to the network, the computational power is not a multiple of (N+1) but an exponential log of N+1. If you have the billions of PC’s in the world linked up, as it is now through the internet, the power is colossal. It’s no wonder that the trio that co-founded YouTube each got a $500 million check from Google, and it’s a no brainer that Yahoo! and Google are as powerful as any Fortune 500 company, competing with Microsoft. Information networking would give the most power to whomever has the biggest critical mass (much like a democracy, I might add). In any business, the biggest mass is usually the customers, not management, not labors, not shareholders, not owners. However, the mass, our patients, is far from fully understanding this complex medical science to really have any sort of power on the marketplace. Even worse, they are far from understanding this as a business, unregulated corporate model that medicine is becoming, replacing the small-business model that a private practice once were. It is intricate and evolving even for doctors like us, and if we don’t keep up with our CME’s, if we don’t constantly fight for our reimbursements admists changing ICD’s codes, we also will loose it. In ancient times, medicine is black magic, best left alone to those hooded alchemists. For a very long time, patients had a trusted relationship with a regular doctor, their only medical reference. The science of medicine did not advanced much in those days. Doctors pretty much had sole propriety of medical knowledge. Those were the easy (good?) years. In 1950’s, you have at most 3-5 doctors that will take care of you if you were admitted to the hospitals. In those days, we only had about 15 specialties. Nowadays, a patient can expect 10-15 doctors, and you would hope that one of them will stay with you and know your whole course. Now, we have more than 50 medical specialties. If medicine today is a round table, there would be at least 30-50 knights (administrators, nurse managers, ethicists, lawyers, utilization reviewers, etc) on it, deciding on a patient’s medical fate and where to best spent the dollar, etc. Is that good or bad? I don’t know. Personally, I think medicine is too complex and evolving too rapidly for any patient to understand, or anyone else who didn’t spent 12 years in school and a lifetime of education for it. The other truth is most of the patients are not that techno-savy. Only 25% of Americans have a 4-yr or higher college degree. That leaves the physician to network (and create a marketing culture, as you have suggested). But this would take another generation, since the PC’s & internet only came of age in our generation. The next generation, I am optimistic, would have effective critical mass in their place of the medical marketplace… as I am optimistic about your pioneering adventures in podcasting. Bests. Man.
Good hearing from you again, Man!
For better or worse, part of the changing environment of medicine is that patients WILL have more power in the marketplace.
There’s no way around that, as a natural response to the changes at the insurer level. As costs of insurance premiums rise, more patients will be “pushed” to consider lower cost options, including the high-deductible plans I discussed in previous posts. When patients start paying more of their office visit costs out of their own pockets, they will act differently than when the copay was routinely tiny. More savvy, selective, and discerning (or demanding, as the case may be).
Whether or not patients are educated enough to responsibly wield that influence is beside the point. Their influence is there — one variable of many that medpros must deal with, but there for sure. Medpros can’t afford to wax poetic about “the sorry state of American medicine.” We have to be dispassionate and adapt to the changes thrown at us.
It may be the case that the biggest detriment to medical bloggers who are doctors may come from the hand that feeds them, rather than, the rapacious former patient or the even more dastardly medical malpractice attorney.
It may be only a matter of time before HMOs and other medical providers forbid their employees from operating podcasts, let alone speaking on podcasts on a regular basis. There are a plethora of legal reasons why such a regulation may become an industry norm. Notwithstanding those arguments, lawyers for those medical providers may simply offer a cost-benefit analysis of letting doctors keep their 1st Amendment rights versus getting sued. FYI, private employers are under no duty to uphold 1st Amendment rights.
Vlad, you raise an interesting point.
I certainly hope that the medical provider hierarchy sees the value of podcasting and blogging, as do some of the largest international organizations (e.g. Boeing and Microsoft). Being cautious about your content is a given no matter what your profession, but the potential PR, marketing, and bottom line benefits from these new media is too big to ignore.
Again, there is podcasting & blogging that promotes and markets your practice by providing value to your patients, and then there’s P&B of, shall we say, a more personally expressive nature. The former can and should be associated with your practice, the latter can be anonymous.
I’d be very interested in hearing feedback from attorneys about how medical P&B does or doesn’t differ from other professional or industry P&B. The “other” fields seem to be proceeding, albeit with caution and awareness and certain guidelines.
Regardless, it seems that the biggest detriment to medical bloggers would still seem to be rooted in a fear of “getting sued,” as you put it.
Thanks for this post! I’ve included it in the Medicine 2.0 Blog Carnival at The Health Wisdom Blog.