Doctor to Doctor: Connect With Your Patients Through Social Media

By Russell Faust, PhD, MD, FAAP, ABIHM Posted January 19, 2012 10:00 Comments

Hi, my name is Russ. I’m a doc, specifically, a pediatric ENT surgeon, a “booger doctor”. I want to talk to the physicians out there. I hope to inspire you to better connect with your patients, and with your colleagues, using social networks.

I know, I know … Facebook, texting, and Twitter are just for teenagers, right? After all, we are all familiar with the inane texting that teens engage in: “hey, I just burped” (or worse).

But don’t be too swift to dismiss social media.

The majority of physicians DO use various social networks in our personal lives, even if it is only to use Facebook or Skype to connect with our grandchildren.

More and more, however, physicians are using various platforms in the digital world to help us in our professional lives, too. The majority of us use some sort of app to help us calculate med dosing (Epocrates, or Medscape), or we simply perform a quick Google search.

We may occasionally login to Sermo, or Doximity, or LinkedIn to check up on colleagues, or to update our credentials. Perhaps a program out there needs a doc with our skills … who knows what the job market will be as healthcare reform rolls along? Never a bad thing to be visible in the job market with an updated CV.

What I mostly want to talk about, though, is how becoming involved – right now – in the digital world, can help your patients. How it can benefit your current practice. In order to be “authentic” and persuasive, let’s use my own practice as a case study.

Eighteen months ago I began blogging.

All of you will be able to relate to my inspiration for this: quite simply, I became frustrated with the amount of mis-information that my patient’s families were coming to clinic with. Mis-information that they had found on the internet.

Families would show up for their first clinic appointment with a huge stack of print-outs from the internet, from their searches on their child’s symptoms. Bless them, they were empowered, they were engaged, and proud of participating in their healthcare. As they should be!

The problem is that the public has no basis for judging the accuracy of the information that they find in the digital world. The majority of that information is NOT created by physicians. The majority of “healthcare information” in the digital world is there to lure readers in and expose them to various advertisements. To get them to “click-through” to another site, and to buy something. A supplement, a medication, an insurance product of some kind.

My greatest frustration with the mis-information was that, instead of focusing on their child’s own healthcare situation, I was forced to spend most of our time at the initial visit re-educating them, providing accurate information, dispelling some of the mis-information they had found online.

That placed me in an awkward position: our first encounter was essentially negative.

Here they were proud of their achievement, and I was too-often forced to point out that the information was not valuable. Made me the bad guy. Not the way I wanted to start a physician-patient relationship.

SO: I decided to provide accurate information myself, and to present that content in the digital world.Using a medical education blog.

The habit of posting an article every week had the desired effect: it provided accurate healthcare information for my small area of specialty, pediatric Ear, Nose & Throat.

Here’s where the story gets interesting.

There have been numerous benefits that I had not expected.

Now, instead of our first encounter being about correcting mis-information, we focus on their specific, personal issues.

Moreover, our first encounter in my clinic is not actually where the family first meets me – they first meet me on my blog site! There, they see my photo. They read about my philosophy of practicing medicine. They read about my approach to specific symptoms and diagnoses.

It’s a wonderful effect: when the family arrives in my clinic for the first visit, they feel as though the already know me. We already have a relationship! And, it’s a positive relationship.

Now, they really do feel proud, engaged, and empowered. They know what to expect from me. And, we spend much more time educating them more deeply about the pathophysiology of a diagnosis, and we can discuss results of clinical trials that provide the basis for my recommendations. After all, isn’t this one of our highest obligations to our patients: to inform them, to provide accurate healthcare information so that they can participate in their health decisions, so that they can achieve optimal health? I see that as an optimal doctor-patient relationship.

More than once I have overheard a parent tell their spouse, “hey, that’s the guy, the ‘boogordoctor’, where we got those articles”. We already have an established relationship. We have a connection. It is a wonderful thing to be well-connected with your patients and their families.

And that connection continues beyond the exit door to my clinic. Studies have found that connected patients are responsible patients – they participate in their care regimen. They are also more loyal to the physicians and hospitals that they are connected with.

Now, for some bottom-line ROI talk:

All of these benefits go beyond just the warm-and-fuzzy.

First, that “connection” effect – patient loyalty – contributes to the bottom line. Studies tell us that a connected patient is worth more than twice what an unconnected patient is worth to a practice (or hospital) over a year. They follow up more often, they don’t shop around for their care, and they comply with the treatment regimen. They make their docs “look good”.

Another benefit I have noticed is that families move through my clinic in a much more efficient manner now. One reason for the efficiency is that they arrive pre-educated from the information – the content – on my blog. They know where the conversation is headed, they anticipate and move in that direction. Without starting over, re-educating them and correcting mis-information, we are much more efficient together.

As a result, I can actually see more patients in a day, without (this is key) feeling more rushed, more pressured. It just flows.

As a surgical specialist, there are times that I recommend surgery as a remedy (despite being pretty conservative with regard to surgery). In those cases, the families are again better-prepared. They have often reviewed the articles on my site that talk about anatomy, or about how to “read” a CT scan, or about the latest in minimally-invasive surgery. As a result, providing informed consent is streamlined – they are already partway along the path to being well-informed.

More bottom-line ROI talk:

As my patient population uses my blog site to answer many of their questions – both before and after seeing me in clinic – the number of telephone calls to my clinic have dropped off significantly. Those were calls that either my nurses or I needed to answer. The result is that my nurses and I can focus on other aspects of patient care, other duties. That is a huge relief, and a huge contribution to the bottom line.

To summarize, I strongly feel that we physicians have an obligation to our patients to not only provide the best possible care, but to also help educate our patients to make the best possible healthcare decisions that they can. Part of being a good doc is optimizing our patients’ ability to participate in their care. It is our obligation to empower them, and to engage them.

My experience with my simple medical education blog site has convinced me that a great way to do that is to provide good healthcare information, and present it in the digital world.

Now that I have witnessed the benefits for my patients and for myself, I lecture on these topics, and teach others how to better connect in the digital world. Great fun!

About Russell Faust, PhD, MD:

Dr. Faust is a physician executive who interprets technology and social media to a variety of audiences through keynotes, blog posts, articles, retreats, and workshops. He has been a medical school professor, an endowed chairman, chief medical officer, and president and EO of several organizations. He is:

Chief of Pediatric Otolaryngology, St. John Health System