Instead, the question should be, why shouldn’t you?
Kim McAllister, over at Better Health, gives some good reasons why health professionals should start a blog. But it shouldn’t just be limited to blogging, but the entire spectrum of social media tools, which give health professionals a powerful way to engage both patients and colleagues.
I recently gave a talk to the folks over at the New England Journal of Medicine, discussing the intersection between medical practice and social media. One point I repeatedly made was that it’s to a health professional’s benefit to have some sort of online presence. Not only to engage and provoke discussion, but also to make them pro-active in the information associated with them when their name is Googled.
More patients will be searching for doctors and hospitals via search engines, and being active in blogs, Facebook and Twitter allows you to define your online reputation. Going forward, this will be one of the more important reasons why doctors, nurses, and medical institutions should have a robust social media presence.
Related posts:
- Doctors have a duty to engage in social media
- Do doctors who use social media prescribe more medications?
- Hospitals are using social media, like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, for advertising to patients
- Talking health care reform and social media in medicine
- How should the FDA regulate the social media advertising of drugs?
- Health care social networking basics for doctors
- Doctors and nurses need the H1N1 flu vaccine, and recent media mentions
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I fully agree with you Kevin.Social media networking is a natural thing we do in everyday life anyway but now we have another electronic means which is only growing.So for healthcare professionals it is important to help spread their message to those that are looking for it.
So I should spend less time seeing patients and more time “engaging in social media?” I don’t get it.
I believe the spirit of this message is to make patients aware of nuances of the process of medical provision.
If healthcare providers do not do this, the only sources of information(or propaganda, or agenda-driven brainwashing) for patients are not apt to deliver a message which is beneficial to the interests of the healthcare provision community.
The greater your presence on social media the greater the chance you are going to have to draw in more patients. Now days social media is almost a must for doctors.
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