What Medical Professionals Ought To Know About…Everyone Else And The Internet
Plain and simple, medpros are dusty old farts when it comes to the Internet and modern technology. You know: what everyone else is using to learn and talk about current events, their health, their job prospects, their friends and coworkers…their healthcare providers.
The critical stuff.
Health and Human Services Director, Michael Leavitt, recently put it like this:
It’s obvious that the medical establishment has yet to complete the jump to the Internet Age. Our health care system has fallen behind every sector of our economy, from car repairs to manufacturing to air travel, for no good reason. There’s something wrong when you can walk away from a bank or mechanic with a detailed, easy-to-read printout but, when it comes to your health, you’re left hoping the pharmacist can make out the doctor’s handwriting.
He was referring specifically to the lack of EMR adoption in 90% of doctors’ offices, but the problem goes way beyond that. For the vast majority of American medpros, it’s an Internet mindset problem of epidemic proportions.
If you’re reading this, you’re by definition ahead of 99% of our profession. You know what a blog is, what a podcast is, and you’re likely familiar with terms like RSS, social networking, and New Media.
Even if you’re not a podcaster, you likely communicate via email, use computers in your daily personal or professional life, and garner information about The World via online news services or feed readers.
Many of our colleagues still vaguely think of the Internet as a collection of fancy, online Smith Corona typewriters. You don’t want to know how many.
Check out the following YouTube video, and compare your tech competence to some savvy power users. Only, this isn’t about how businessmen in Belgium communicate and think via the Internet, or surgical chiefs in Hanover, or even Silicon Valley geeks.
It’s about how typical American college students — the cream of the world’s crop, the pinnacle of human intellectual development — have integrated the Internet and social media into every aspect of their lives, of which studying is (still) a tiny part.
Sobering, yes?
2 comments
Amazing. Great video and thanks for posting Peter.
Also one of the reasons I attended a small, public honors liberal arts college (St. Mary’s College of Maryland). Every teacher I had knew my name and I still consider several of my professors mentors.
If I have to figure out how to pay for over 100k of learning expenses I want top value for my money (and the governments, and my parents, and aunts and uncles, and everyone else who helped pay my way).
My sister attended a large workshop “gown em and town em” school (VA Tech) and ended up attending classes in lecture halls so large she could sleep through a seminar.
Who’s gotten more bang for their college dollar? Hard to say.
We’re both working in fields our degrees are *supposed* to have prepared us for, but we’d also both agree we’ve learned more about the world of work from collaborating and commiserating than sitting through coursework and prereqs.
Thank you for commenting, Jen! You raise an interesting point yourself: the value of education coming from quality connections and contextualizing that only experience can bring.
How we make those connections is less important than actually making them. But in the New Millenium, the medium of those connections will increasingly be Internet based, even in medicine, which trails other professions in adopting tech.
New Media like podcasting, blogging, and social networking aren’t substitutes for access to experience and your own hard work — you can waste time with a blog just as easily as anything else — but fluency with them WILL likely be a prerequisite to staying educated, current and relevant.
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