Doctor: Social media can help create bond with patients
Doctor: Social media can help create bond with patients
- January 16th, 2012By Mary Ann Roser: AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Does your doctor tweet?
Dr. Kurt Frederick of Premier Family Physicians in South Austin posts comments and news for patients on Twitter, but he’s one of few doctors who uses social media professionally.
Although most doctors follow the latest whiz-bang devices and other advances in medical technology, they have been slow to embrace new technologies for interacting with patients, according to experts and studies.
Frederick said they are missing a vital opportunity, not only to attract new patients who will find them online but to build deeper, lasting ties with patients.
“I think people want to see us as more than a white coat twice a year,” said Frederick, 51. “They want to know what we read; what we think about things. They want to know about our families, and … that creates a bond.” But he doesn’t know any other doctors in Austin who are using social networking to the extent that his practice of nine doctors and eight physician assistants does.
Doctors and experts say barriers to social networking include concerns about breaching patient confidentiality, naiveté, liability concerns, and a lack of time and money.
“It’s the payment system,” which doesn’t reward doctors unless they provide treatment, Frederick said, “and inertia on doctors’ parts.”
Physicians traditionally have not been paid for activities that keep people well, but that’s changing. And Frederick said those changes will fuel more social media use.
Doctors’ online patient interactions, including those involving Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites, “certainly are growing, and it’s growing a lot over the last year,” said Jonathan Nelson, a spokesman for the Texas Academy of Family Physicians. But he estimates that roughly 15 percent of doctors are regular users.
“Everybody is going online to search for health information,” Nelson said. What a doctor like Frederick is doing with social media is “extending the care he is providing beyond the clinic walls.”
Dr. Howard Luks, an orthopedic surgeon in Hawthorne, N.Y., wrote in an online column that “only the oil refinery business lags healthcare in digital media adoption.” That’s a mistake, he wrote, because “in 2011 it is simply no longer advisable to simply have a static, template driven online ‘presence’ or no presence at all.”
A survey this year of 4,000 physicians by QuantiaMD, an online information exchange for doctors, found that 15 percent used Facebook professionally, 8 percent used YouTube and blogs, and 3 percent posted on Twitter.
An American Medical Association policy on social media use urges caution and constant monitoring to ensure that standards of patient privacy are maintained. It also warns that failing to take care with content could harm reputations and taint careers.
Although caution is advisable, Frederick said, he has not encountered problems.
At Premier Family Physicians, he has championed the cause and pushed some of his more reluctant colleagues to get involved.
The patients are responding, said Rich Steinle, the practice’s CEO.
“It’s a way of creating community,” Steinle said. “When you know your doctor … then you have trust.”
He sees a broad spectrum of patients participating.
“Everyone assumes it’s for millennials, but the fastest-growing group of social media users are baby boomers and older folks,” Steinle said. “Out of 40,000 active patients, 13,000 are signed up for the online practice. That’s jaw-dropping around the country.”
Two years ago, Premier moved into electronic medical records in a big way and has become a show-off site for its technology vendor, Greenway Medical Technologies of Carrollton, Ga. Premier has hosted visits and tours to about 40 physician groups and clinics from across Texas and from states ranging from Mississippi to California, according to Dr. Kevin Spencer at Premier. The Greenway system allows patients to send emails, review lab reports, refill prescriptions and make appointments, Frederick said.
Patients have a user name and password and can access confidential health information and pay bills online.
The Web portal also directs patients to the practice’s social media, including Facebook, Frederick said.
He writes an occasional blog post to let people know what the doctors are saying about flu shots, allergies and other topics. He posted a video of a colleague, Dr. Rita Schultz, discussing the human papillomavirus vaccine.
Frederick got interested in social media when his three daughters started college, and he didn’t want to be left behind, he said.
The endeavor has not been costly, he said. His son, Johnny, a sophomore at Westlake High School, helped him make the videos and post them online.
“I spent about $500 on consulting, and I bought my son a couple of hamburgers,” said Frederick, a doctor for 21 years. “It comes easy. It’s not intimidating.”
Nor does it take a lot of time — just a few hours a week, he said.
He gets six or seven emails a day from patients, while another 25 to 30 go to staff for refills and appointments.
“You would think people would pester you to death, but it’s rare that I get abused in email from a patient,” he said.
One of his patients, Meg Kells-Murphy, 28, of Austin, said she follows the practice on Facebook, especially trying to solve the medical mysteries that Frederick features under the heading “Are You Smarter Than a Medical Student?”
“I love that. I try not to Google it,” Kells-Murphy said. She also likes reading what Frederick posts.
“I get to see more of his personality than I do in the office,” she said. “It’s interesting because I’m interested in health care. It’s another dimension in our doctor-patient relationship.”
