Monday, October 5, 2009

Internet impacts patient’s choices

On a recent visit to a hospital outside of Atlanta, I had the opportunity to round with a long time physician practicing there. One of his patients asked me if I wanted to know how he chose this internist to be his primary doctor. Curious, I answered yes.
“When I moved here, I knew I would need a doctor at this hospital,” he said. “I called the referral service and they gave me four names. I closed my eyes and prayed really hard. The Lord answered my prayers and told me to put the names in alphabetical order and choose the last name on the list. That was Dr. W.”
This is an uncommon way for patients to choose their physicians. Word of mouth is still the usual means patients use for finding a doctor, but today’s electronic age is beginning to change things. The internet provides technology which expands people’s ability to gather information. With BlackBerries in hand, the data is at their fingertips.
The extent to which this affects health care was discussed at a recent Health 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. It is believed that 80 percent of people surfing the web are looking for health information and somewhere between 60 - 80 percent begin their search with Google. Patients are not only searching for answers about their symptoms and diagnosis, they are researching physicians. Our past, present and potential future patients are investigating us. What they find has the power not only to influence their choice of physician, but may also affect the perception of the care given by their existing doctors. Sometimes it is for the better, sometimes not.
I did an experiment and entered “Barbara B. Loeb, MD” into the Google search box. In addition to some expected results, a dozen websites like www.RateMDs.com and www.healthgrades.com appeared. These are unsubstantiated consumer web sites where patients comment publicly on physicians. Although these sites have unique URLs, the information contained on them often seems to be metastatic with exactly the same information appearing on multiple sites. I suspect the information is sold from one to another. In this long list, I was hoping that the MD directory from the Advocate web site would be among the selections. Unfortunately it wasn’t.
What should be our reaction to this unsolicited publicity? First, it is important to realize it exists. Secondly, we must provide the best care we can to our patients which automatically promotes the best reviews. Some sites allow you to comment and correct inaccuracy. More important than this is to realize, like it or not, we all have an internet presence and we all can develop strategies to manage its content. One option is to create our own individual web sites or online profiles, which can work well to counteract these unwanted sites.
But as part of Advocate, we can work toward making the Advocate web site more robust with easily searchable information on all of the physicians. We can facilitate this by first providing current and accurate information to be posted. Secondly, we can work as a Medical Staff to urge Advocate to invest more resources to heighten the visibility of the MD component of Advocate Online. By promoting our high quality physicians, Advocate promotes the hospitals and the organization overall. Using the right technology in the right way will in the end benefit the patients by providing them with accurate information and giving them the sense that they are being cared for by the best clinical team.
Kind Regards,
Barbara Loeb, M.D.

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