Facebook for Physicians

I came across an interesting posting by Tej Deol MD, a Canadian trained doctor and expatriate now living in Singapore.  He had recently attended a conference put on AdvaMed, a Washington-based lobbying group representing the medical device industry. In this posting, he comments on one of the conference sessions that covered the area of "social collaboration" in the medical community, and suggests that the push is driven by the powers that be really to facilitate the goal of usage data gathering.

That word "collaboration" seems to be popping its head up over and over again. It was just a couple of weeks ago, that Canada Health Infoway's CEO, Richard Alvarez used that term to describe what he felt was lacking in Canadian Healthcare to ensure EMR uptake and success.

It seems that in the US, there are a growing number of social networking companies who are specifically catering to the medical space. Companies like Sermo, WebMD, MedPage, MedConnect, Epocrates, Proximity, QuantiaMD and others. Sermo bills itself as "the largest online physician community in the US.... Sermo is a real-time meeting place where physicians get help with everything from patient care to practice management. They’ve described it as “therapeutic,” a “virtual water cooler” and “vital to my everyday practice.”


(Taken from Sermo slide presentation)

Most of us have trouble thinking of physicians as getting online to start conferring with colleagues during the day. But it makes sense. It's got to be coming to healthcare. It's starting to happen everywhere else.

Recently, while exploring an opportunity in the retagging and contextualization of medical research, I learned an important lesson about healthcare delivery - namely, that physicians, on the whole, are more likely to discuss patient cases and treatment with their colleagues than they are to start pouring through research. There's just too much of it, and the answers can't be gleaned from the abstracts alone. It's assumed that one would "hear" about the most important research anyway. Conferring with a fellow doctor, on the phone, over dinner or on the golf course is easier, dependable, and therefore safer ("conventional wisdom").

As we witness the shift from the paper-based medical practice to the EMR-based practice, and usher in the new generation of Facebook-literate, Blackberry-texting medical graduates, one can only assume that the conferring will continue amongst healthcare professionals, but most of it will be online. "Collaboration"will ultimately be at the kernel of the medical practice... Collaboration with colleagues, patients, medical suppliers, research publishers, and indeed with the entire patient healthcare delivery chain.  It's a good thing.  I think like all good things, it will take time to evolve into its most positive iteration.

I only hope that the new order of collaborative physicians maintain a higher standard for social etiquette than the rest of us do with our smartphones when collaborating.  If not, I pray that my own doctor doesn't receive that long-awaited text message in the midst of my next prostate exam.