You've read about the old paradigm of information delivery to patients. What reasons do I have to set up an efficient system to transmit time-sensitive medically relevant information?
1. Compliance
I am going to take a massive leap and say, awareness of one’s condition in itself leads to positive clinical outcomes as a whole, versus lack of awareness of one’s condition. If you’ve followed me in this ‘leap’, you would probably agree that delivering disease info to patients is paramount. Doing this with some regularity can only multiply the positive outcomes.
2. 80:20 rule
It has been postulated that 20% of patients use 80% of healthcare resources. While I can’t say for certain this is accurate, we could postulate the theorist was in the ballpark. Having said this, the take home for me and the 80:20 rule: there’s a magnificent amount of redundancy in medicine.
Why not use this to our advantage? In the area of information delivery, let’s reduce those redundant tasks into a one time, one place event. Let’s commit to designing an efficient central information collection and distribution center.
In your arsenal of articles you’ve found some gems for a given disease; let’s use Chrohn’s disease as an example. Amongst those articles include: a fantastic article explaining what exactly Chrohn’s Disease is and what can be anticipated; a recent article that dispels the rumors of Chrohn’s Disease; and an article on new treatment options that you endorse in Chrohn’s Disease.
Copying a packet or e-mailing the pdf or links to every patient that walks into your office with Chrohn’s, takes time and compromises valuable resources. Time that should be spent on the other 39 patients, labs, hospital visits, etc. Why not post to one area where your patients have the freedom to read at their leisure without time restrictions, comment and interact with you or other patients with the same diseases or interests, and allow your patients to take more responsibility for their condition? This forum that I am alluding to is an area that the great majority of your patient population already has familiarity and command.
3. Branding: whether you care or not about your medical or non-medical worth, branding plays a significant piece to the valuation formula. If someone hops onto a given physician (or other professional) review web repository, and completely trashes your good name and good practices, they effectively trash your brand. In the eyes of your current colleagues, patients, and non-patients, you’ve taken a real hit.
In sports (and life), a good offense can serve as a strong defense. Having said this, every physician has the power to marginalize any given negative onslaught with an overwhelming number of positive posts that reflect the true good will and servitude of that individual. Every time you post an article or opinion on an article, it gets logged into search engines/spiders and helps formulate your working perception as internet users search your name and practice. The more posts you pump out, the greater chance your consensus opinion is drawn from these. Furthermore, the less likely a given negative post will have deleterious effects. Like anything else, this isn’t full proof. Gross neglect will garner the attention of other bloggers and news media to a point that you can never compete with.
4. Public interest pulse:
Identify and answer the questions before they come up. Back in 2008, the great Oprah did a show pointing the finger of blame of obesity on thyroid hormone levels. Needless to say, the number of useless and costly thyroid panels went through the roof. Shortly thereafter, a few clinicians logically wrote articles criticizing Oprah’s ‘medicine’ and reported the real main sources of American obesity. These articles proved to be an invaluable resource for physicians hoping to guide their patients into “the know.”
To make the aforementioned happen you need two tools: Google Reader and Facebook. I don’t see either one of these multibillion dollar players going anywhere soon. Thus you’ve got security that you can lean onto these tools for the foreseeable future. Let’s roll up our sleeves with the upcoming posts and focus on our purpose here: data collection (through Google Reader) and data distribution (through Facebook.) Click here to continue.
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