According to QuantiaMD and CareContinuum Alliance’s September 2011 report, “Doctors, Patients & Social Media,” only 11% of physicians surveyed were familiar with one or more online patient communities. (I recently wrote more about this report and how physicians are keeping up with social media growth.) However, of those 11%, 2 out of 3 believe these [...]
I just finished reading an interesting article by Rick Donahue, MD, “The secret to better patient care is time.” Dr. Donahue makes several well-thought-out points about how spending more time with patients can go far in helping to fix the healthcare system.
He says he was an “island doctor” for 10 years, which gave him more time with [...]
I just came upon this e-newsletter post from the esteemed Henry J. Kaiser Foundation. Here’s one of the eye-opening passages:
From Iowa to Brazil, researchers are discovering there is a distinct association between complaints, worries and random rants on the social media site and the spread of medical issues as wide-ranging as the flu, dengue fever [...]
This recent article looks at a wide range of digital communication modalities — everything from old-fashioned cell phones to Skype and Web conferencing — at a number of prominent institutions in the Detroit area. The key point I take away from this article is that patients want to move much faster than doctors do.
I don’t [...]
In a recent Time article, “Googling Symptoms Helps Patients and Doctors,” Dr. Zachary Meisel wrote about the “Google stack” — what some doctors call the stack of papers patients bring in with research they’ve done about their symptoms. Every doctor has experienced it, we’re sure. Patients come into your office with a self-diagnosis, sometimes accurate [...]
As doctors or healthcare professionals, you’ve certainly encountered embarrassed patients. Regardless of the fact that you are treating your patients’ medical problems, and most likely have seen many others with the same issues, patients can’t help feeling that they are alone in their distress. It is difficult for patients to view their personal health issues [...]
My own Facebook updates are increasingly cluttered with messages from companies and nonprofits I’ve decided to “like.” I’ve chosen to like a few publishing companies (since I’m a publishing consultant), a couple of political blogs, and the Philadelphia Phillies, among others. In the last 48 hours, I must have seen 20 Phillies status updates based [...]
Each week, we select an article from an influential journal that has broad implications for health care and has just become available for free online.
As defined in this week’s article, “Telehealth is the delivery of health care at a distance, using information and communication technology. The major rationales for its introduction have been to decrease costs, improve efficiency and [...]
One of the significant advantages of the Internet is the way it enables people with specific interests or concerns to find similar people and interact with them. This is certainly true of social media. In addition to tracking down your erstwhile high-school crush, you can also find Facebook groups dealing with almost anything that interests [...]
Throughout the developed world, patients can benefit from the fantastic technical advances of the last 50-plus years — everything from antibiotics to MRIs and targeted treatments against certain forms of cancer (for instance, the true miracle drug Gleevec). This assumes, though, that patients have the means and the desire to find the technological fix they [...]
