Social Media for Healthcare Professionals

The use of social media – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, etc. – is a growing phenomenon that potentially impacts clinicians. The issues raised by social media are important to understand. We have created a curriculum for clinician education about these issues, which were recently presented to a conference of physicians. In view of the positive response, we have included that slide show for more general use.

In general, it is useful to think of social media for healthcare professionals in 3 different domains: (1) practice-to-public, (2) peer-to-peer, and (3) physician-to-patient.

The practice-to-public domain is a very appropriate use of social media tools. It is about exposing and marketing one’s medical practice to the public, not unlike the old “yellow pages” ads. There are ways of effectively using Facebook, Twitter, and the like, in order to gain visibility of one’s practice.

Peer-to-peer interaction, if it does not involve specific Protected Health Information (PHI), can also be done – letting colleagues know about one’s practice is not too dissimilar from the practice-to-public methods. However, if the peer-to-peer communication is to be about specific patients, then a secure platform needs to be established to exchange PHI.

Physician-to-patient interaction impacts HIPAA. On-line interaction that involves PHI needs to be on a secure platform, and not regular email, or Facebook. There are emerging technologies that make this possible, but awareness of the HIPAA impact of such interactions is important.

It is also important to distinguish between “medical data” and PHI. Information that patients collect themselves – for example, on web sites or via mobile devices that are consumer-facing – is simply “medical data.” Once a patient shares that information with a clinician, then it becomes PHI – the clinician is obligated to be a custodian, and safeguard that data, and only share it with others upon permission of the patient.

We hope the slide deck will be helpful. If there is interest in making this presentation to appropriate audiences, please contact us.