Semester 3 Week 5: E-patients and doctors in social media

First slideshow: The world of e-patients

• Who is a good patient? (referring to I am a good patient, believe it or not; Alejandro R Jadad, Carlos A Rizo, Murray W Enkin; BMJ  2003;326:1293-1295 (14 June), doi:10.1136/bmj.326.7402.1293 )
• Types of patients: the powerful other; external controller, internal controller or google patient or brainsucker or googlers
• An e-patient is equipped, enabled, empowered, engaged, equal and expert.
• Examples (5 stories) including maartensjourney.com and youtube.com/user/geriatric1927
• What do e-patients use? Websites (Web MD), blogs (fightpompe.com, sixuntilme.com); Second Life (Healthinfo Island), services (sugarstats.com or traineo.com)
• Community sites:
• Patientslikeme.com: Featuring the research they’re doing
• imedix.com: real-time chat
• dlife.com: biggest diabetic community
• butyoudontlooksick.com, iancommunity.org, mycarecommunity.org
• What to do with medical charts and papers? Introduction to the world of personal health records (Google Health, Microsoft Healthvault).
• How does a community work? I posted a message on Twitter, Kerri replied to it and made a video message for the students.

• Statistics about how patients use the web (source is Pew Internet Project Survey)
• Describing apomediation
• How to help e-patients as doctors (don’t use jargons, be patient, show credible sites focusing on medically reliable information)

Take-home message:

Physicians of the 21st century must be qualified to meet the expectations of e-patients. They’re the new generation of patients.

Second slideshow: Doctors in social media

• What is social media?
• Traditional vs social media (pros and cons)
• I have an opinion and post it online
• But others have their own opinions as well
• It becomes hard to find information and we need places/sites where information is collected and selected by other experts and collegues.
• How to find a collegue or get answer for a medical question? By using telephone, Google or Facebook? Certainly not…
• We need medical community sites
• Examples: Tiromed.com, Sermo.com, Nature Network and many more.
• Microblogging (Twitter and Friendfeed)
• Advantages of medical communities, disadvantages

Take-home message:

Without properly designed strategy, don’t even think about using social media in your practice.

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