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Physicians & Social Media: #MedX April 29, 2014

Ever since I started utilizing social media 7-8 years ago, there have always been questions about physicians using social media. Tonight, our friends at Stanford Medicine X had a google hangout talking about this specific topic. The entire 60 minute video can be seen above.

Here are a few of my own observations about the video and the topic of Physicians and Social Media:

  • Physicians and Social Media does NOT mean extending your work day: Using social media does not mean making yourself available 24/7 to patient questions. Social media can be used for patient education, health policy change, and more than clinical work. 
  • Curating Information is just as important as creating content: I used to think that physicians need to create content on the internet to make a difference. That's not necessarily true. The shear volume of information out there is overwhelming. Sorting through information is certainly a skill that I do not have, and finding physicians who can wade through that info on twitter - that's important to me.
  • Physicians and Providers need to find Value in Social Media for them to use it: One of the most common questions that I get is this: "How can we get more physicians to use social media?" Using social media just to use it - this is not reason enough. The challenge will be to find the value for each physician/provider.
  • The Holy Grail is proving Social Media positively affects patient and healthcare outcomes: This question has been around since I started being involved in social media. We have yet to have large scale and reproducible data. Whomever does this holds to they to why healthcare providers started doing social media in the first place
  • My final observation is that it was great to see my long time social media colleague, Dr. Bryan Varabedian (aka @Doctor_V and creator of the 33 Charts website) speaking on this topic again. His opening remarks stated that when we all started on this in 2006, there was a small & intimate network on physicians out there. It was great to get to know @Doctor_V as we were physician panels together at that time. Just for fun, I found the podcast below when I interviewed @Doctor_V in June 2010 before we were on a panel together in San Francisco. I was still "Doctor Anonymous" back then, and seems like it was just yesterday...

Thanks to our friends at Stanford Medicine X for these programs on youtube to, not only share topics, but also to have a community come together to have a live chat on twitter. I've found many new people to follow on twitter and for me to start new conversations with them. I'm looking forward to attending the MedX meeting in the fall...

Twitter For Healthcare Professionals

It's always fun to be included in "Top 10" lists, or in this case, a "Top 100" list. eMedCert looks like a startup who is going to be launching some kind of service and/or app in the near future. To help get them some attention, they have done "a great deal of research" to and, last night, named the "Top 100 Twitter Accounts for Healthcare Professionals to Follow."

On their site they state: "A great deal of research went into this, and many outstanding and deserving twitter feeds were left off the list. There will undoubtedly be several accounts not featured on this list that may be more useful to you personally. However, in our opinion, these 100 twitter accounts ultimately proved to offer the most valuable to healthcare professionals in general."

Thanks so much to the site for including me on their list! Here are some other lists that I have been included on:

NCSC Throwback Thursday

As I talked about in yesterday's post, one of the fun things that #FMRevolution can do is to share photos and memories from past NCSC meetings. What you'll see below are pics from the meetings I attended including 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2007. You'll have to figure out which year goes with which picture.

In addition, I'll be live podcasting on Thursday, April 24, 2014 at 3pm Eastern Time at this link. The Mike Sevilla Radio Program will be previewing next week's AAFP NCSC 2014 meeting including my predictions, my hopes, and my expectations from the meeting. Don't worry if you cannot join live. I'll make the podcast available here, so that you can download and listen to on the flight to Kansas City :)

Why #FMRevolution Will Explode Next Week

One of the many cool things about twitter is that once in a while, you find a really cool link. Our pal Dave Tran, who is in the last few weeks of Medical School (aka @rollkicksoul), posted some interesting data about the #FMRevolution hashtag.

In the above graph, you see that the first posts of #FMRevolution were just about 3 years ago in 2011. And then, in that time, there have been as much as 4,000 tweets with the hashtag. I gotta tell ya, it looks really cool when the data points are graphed out like this.

Those high points in the graph area associated with conferences with many #FMRevolution people including the AAFP Congress of Delegates (every fall; hashtag #aafpCOD) and the AAFP National Conference of Special Constituencies (every spring; hashtag #aafpNCSC and #aafpALF). I would presume that for other advocacy groups, peak times on twitter are conferences were many advocates attend.

So "Why Will #FMRevolution Explode Next Week?" Well, the reason is that the 2014 AAFP National Conference of Special Constituencies start next week. If I had to guess, this will be the biggest gathering of the #FMRevolution so far in 2014. My bold prediction will be a record number above 5000 #FMRevolution tweets during the course of the meeting next week.

The other interesting #FMRevolution graphic from Symplur is above which shows those who are leaders in "Mentions," "Tweets," and "Impressions." Now, don't get me wrong, we're all on the same team, so the leaders - to me - are not too concerning.

What I'm really impressed with is the statistic of 106 million impressions on twitter in the past 3 years. There have also been 42,790 tweets during that time from 3,834 participants. Those statistics are amazing to me.

It has been very gratifying to watch the community grow in the past couple of years. As I meet Family Physicians at meeting, as I give social media talks around the country, I tell people the #FMRevolution story. The community grows one person at a time by telling our story of why we love Family Medicine and why we love social media to tell that story. Look out Kansas City, the #FMRevolution returns next week!

Why Only 10 Minute Appointments?

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One of the most common questions that I get is this one: "Hey Doc, why only 10 minute appointments?" I read this fascinating article today from Kaiser Health News dated April 21, 2014 entitled, "15-Minute Visits Take A Toll On The Doctor-Patient Relationship." I definitely encourage you to read it.

I know you're not surprised when I tell you the reason comes down to money. There is an actual formula that the article defines a term called "Relative Value Units" to calculate physician fees. In essence, the formula was how the fifteen minute visit was created.

The article does a great job talking about the plight of the Primary Care Physician. In the 1990s, "Managed Care" came in a cut physician fees significantly. The only way to try to recover these losses, was to increase volume, meaning seeing more patients per hour and per day.

In the last section of the article, it states that having less time for a patient/physician interaction is bad. Duh. Like we didn't know that. Some physicians have solved this problem by leaving all insurances behind. This is what sparked the current Direct Primary Care surge and the associated concierge medicine models.

Other models have popped up as well, including the Patient Centered Medical Home model in which providers are paid a "per member per month" fee and this hopes to relieve the financial strain of the current system, and hopefully gets more time with the physician & patient.

The only way to preserve the Physician/Patient relationship is to try to ensure more appointment time to cultivate and foster this relationship. One thing we do know is that our current system does not do this. Hopefully, with innovative and creative health care models, solutions can be found to gain more time during office visits and improve Physician/Patient communication.

Letterman Retiring in 2015

During his show tonight, David Letterman announced that he would be retiring in 2015. The video link is below which shows the explanation from his show tonight.

Being in high school in the late 1980s, one of the things I looked forward to was to watch The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and then Late Night with David Letterman. The next day, my buddies and I would be repeating the jokes that we heard the night before. Those guys made me imagine about being a funny talk show host, and, in fact, influenced how I do my silly podcasts now.

Late night talk show television has changed so much since my high school days. And, I admit that I don't watch too much of it anymore. However, the influence of Carson & Letterman will be seen in late night talk show hosts of the future, and television will never be the same again....