Has the bug bitten you yet? The Facebook bug? It's hard these days not to be infected by the explosive buzz around social media, especially Facebook, and to ponder its implications for medicine. First, Hollywood releases a zippy-dialogue movie about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Weeks later, the flick cleans up at the Golden Globe Awards with four trophies. Then, nearly simultaneously, Experien Hitwise proclaims Facebook to be the most visited website on the Internet, nudging ahead of juggernaut Google's in popularity. Today, nearly one in ten of visits to websites among Americans is to Facebook. Given the site's phenomenal popularity, any manager or shareholder in a specialty medical practice might be inclined to say, "If we want more patients, we'd better do something big on Facebook and quick!"
And would that be the best place to throw more resources? Probably not. At least not according to the data we're seeing in work with practices coast to coast. While it's no doubt wise for specialty practices not to ignore Facebook, there are growing signs that other social media are having much more direct impact on how patients select doctors.
Our advice: Innoculate yourself against the Facebook bug. Redirect your impulses. For building the reputation of a medical practice, focus instead on a social media force with far greater impact on private specialty medical practices.
Hard truths for doctor shoppers
To understand the power of social media in the health care world, let's acknowledge an immutable truth: patients have very little ability to judge a physician's skills objectively.Every spring, Consumer Reports produces a special April automotive issue. So exhaustively complete is this car-shopper bible that it sells out on newstands year after year. The issue examines everything from maintenance records to crash tests for nearly every model and make of automobile. Unfortunately, there is no CR equivalent for doctor shoppers.
As for the annual "Top Doctors" issues of city magazines, the health care consumer receives dubious benefit. Fellow physicians vote on top docs based largely on hearsay, leaving the left-outs grumbling about a selection process about as data driven as the election of prom king and queen.
In a perfect world where the consumer rules all, patients might expect state and local medical societies and specialty associations to furnish comparative data about physician members. Of course, these organizations would sooner spread the ebola virus that distribute any such information.
Okay, so why not the government as such a purveyor? The National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control publish millions of pages for health care consumers on the web about virtually all health conditions and treatments known to humans. Why shouldn't they do the same for health care providers?
Well, they do. Sort of. For fertility clinics. Of all the 100-plus medical specialties practiced in the U.S., the CDC requires only reproductive endocrinologists to report outcomes of their work, and then it's only for one kind of treatment: in vitro fertilization. Moreover, by the time the data is reported, verified and published, it's three years old and of declining use to a savvy shopper of fertility docs.
The desktop referral
Where, then, does a patient turn? In the old days, she turned to her primary care physician, a group that habitually generated nearly all referrals to specialists. If she were assertive and lucky, she asked around till she found someone who'd been through similar symptoms previously till she found a family and/or friend recommendation.But all that was BI, before the Internet. Now nearly all roads to new doctors lead through web searches. Eight million Americans go online daily to research health information, or about 100 every second of every hour of the year.
First, most begin by thoroughly researching their symptoms, diagnosis and possible treatments. Only then do they look for doctors.
It's not hard to imagine how this online doctor shopping works. Google even tells us how it works. Through colossal volumes of search data, Google reports that searchers typically use terms such as "Minneapolis cancer doctors" and "Dallas orthopedic surgeons" and "Oregon hip replacements."
This kind of effort narrows the field by simply identifying nearby physician candidates for a patient in need. Inevitably, however, the patient goes to the next question, "Just how good is any of these physicians I've found?"
Moving down the marketing funnel
Increasingly, for an answer to this question, she's not asking another doctor or even a friend or a family member. She's asking a stranger. Or, rather, she's asking as many strangers as possible, just like she asks strangers about other goods and services.The patient may visit Facebook somewhere along the route to a physician selection. After all, she might be able to judge a doctor's popularity merely from the number of Facebook friends he's attracted. Most or all will be strangers to the researching patient, yet she still gives them some degree of immediate trust. However, there's a far better system for gathering more balanced, more trustworthy patient feedback.
The hot social medium today with the biggest potential impact on physicians is rate-your-doctor websites. They're everywhere, from Yelp! to RateMDs.com to HealthGrades, swelling in visits and consumer reviews at an unprecedented rate. And they're having growing effect on patients' selection of physicians, according to several pieces of evidence we're seeing.
Stay tuned to my next blog posting for more on this rapidly evolving public-relations force and how to manage it better for your practice.