Medicine and Social Media :Can patients change physician behavior?
“Traditional heart surgery has always been a mixed blessing,” Murphy says. “Sure, it’s life-saving, but it takes you two or three months to recover. The heart recovers in a couple of hours. But the body takes much longer. With robotic surgery, the patient is out of the hospital in less than half the time and recovered in three weeks. I’m talking back to playing golf or tennis.”
Why isn’t robotic cardiac surgery already the treatment of choice? Murphy estimates that it takes 100 cases to learn to perform it efficiently, and there’s no immediate financial incentive to do that since the reimbursement is the same. That means few surgeons — let alone other members of the surgical team — can afford to travel and observe an expert in action.
Will Patients Change Physician Behavior
Yet another example that makes you scratch your head. This guy can fix my heart valve through a few small stab wounds and have me on the tennis court in a month. Traditional surgery, which involves cutting open the sternum and exposing the heart, leaves me with the chance of returning to tennis in 6 mos, if at all. Hmmm… not a tough choice. Social media has the potential to improve the adoption of technologies in medicine by increasing patient awareness— they will in turn seek out the appropriate expert who is skilled in the newer, less invasive, proven techniques. Physicians worry about the loss of income associated with the learning curve of adopting new technology. That won’t matter in the *social* world… the patients will find another surgeon. IMHO.
Your thoughts?
Social Media, along with other media can have a strong influence on ‘standard of practice’. In ophthalmology we saw the following occur with the adoption of ‘small incision cataract surgery’ (akin to small incision bypass surgery)
1. Strong resistance by ophthalmologists due to the lack of large numbers of case to prove the risk benefit ratio was acceptable. (in the early days it was not due to corneal decompensation. As techniques and equipment evolved making it much safer.
2. Follow the money. When hospitals and ASCs discovered they could do more cases, less costly in a like period of time they preferred those surgeons who used phacoemulsification
3, Case selection must reach a tipping point which can take five or more years to occur. New trainees will come out of training skilled in the procedure
4. Eventually older and more experienced surgeons will adopt to it as patient and hospital pressure is applied, and if their revenues decrease as they are de-selected by patients.
5. Social media can play a role in the transition.
Thanks Gary!
Couldn’t agree more. It’s happening in orthopedics too.
Howard
Will the change be for the better though?
How do you manage a patient presenting to your clinic requesting implant X, Y and Z? Or an operation for something you don’t think needs it? As you say maybe they will just walk down the road and get it done by some a bit less scrupulous than you…
Social media is great but patient education by people like yourself is the key to social media in healthcare. Otherwise we will just get implant companies and every Tim, Dick and Harry spamming these poor folks with bad information.
As physicians I think we take into account what patients needs are and compute that with our knowledge to come to a decisions. We have the education and training and ultimately the buck stops with us?
Interesting topic though.
Dr Segar… you bring up a great question… and one that I wrestle with frequently. We will soon add 32 million plus patients to the insurance rolls yet we do not have the physicians available to treat them. What role will tech play to enable “self treatment” or guidance? What role will physician extenders have? Check out Bryan post on Physician Relevance at http://www.33charts.com . It is a thought provoking an worthwhile read.
You are also correct… improving access to quality information is critical, but assessing the quality of that information is difficult at best for patients. There is far too much commercialized nonsense out there. That is how I perceive my role — thus my site and overall social media presence… and I feel that physicians have a moral obligation to do the same.
As opposed to the recent Economist Article; Technology is not about replacing physicians … instead, we must remember, change brings opportunity — and we must use these troubling times to to scale great physician thought leaders!.
Technology can be utilized to enhance the patient-physician relationship from a communications and educational perspective… but physicians need their local, regional, state and national orgs to take a role in educating “us” how best to do so.
Thanks for stoppign by and I appreciate your comment!
Howard
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