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Social Media Can Improve Healthcare, But Are Doctors Holding Us Back?
Mar 7th
Travis’ Note: Today’s Guest Post is from Houston Neal from Software Advice. The original article was posted here. Thanks to Michael Koploy for bringing this post to our attention, and to Software Advice for allowing us to share this content here at Science of Blogging.
“Tremendous.” A surprising word to come up in discussion about healthcare. But this is the word I heard several times in recent conversation on social media and medicine.
“Doctors have a tremendous opportunity to help patients online,” said Dr. Kevin Pho, better known as @kevinmd.
“If you look at [social media in] healthcare, the benefits to everyone are tremendous,” agrees Howard Luks, orthopedic surgeon and Chief of Sports Medicine and Arthroscopy at University Orthopedics, PC.
Putting these together, we might say, “social media has a tremendous opportunity to improve healthcare.”
But doctors have been slow to adopt social media. Why? Why aren’t they using social media to talk with other professionals, connect with patients and share information with the public?
The time commitment, concerns of liability, and naiveté are cited as major causes. But I think these miss the bigger picture. Social media is about more than the relationships between individuals. It’s about the dissemination of information. Information that can improve health care and save lives.
An Extension of the Exam Room
More and more Americans are going online to look for health information. Estimates are as high as 81%. While some argue this makes doctors less relevant, I think otherwise.
Social media allows doctors to extend their influence beyond the exam room. It allows them to share valuable information with patients, the public, and each other.
“Information is the new third party in the exam room,” says Dr. Bryan Vartabedian, attending physician at Texas Children’s Hospital. “We can influence information that our patients are reading. Doctors need to be part of the conversation to have a positive impact.”
Social media allows us to share information at a speed and distance that was once impossible. It presents a new opportunity to prevent, diagnose, and treat diseases. In some cases, even save lives. But we still need more engagement from healthcare professionals. Doctors have an opportunity – and an obligation – to join us in sharing information online.
How do Physicians Behave on Twitter?
Mar 2nd
As the popularity of social media has increased during the past few years, it is not surprising that the number of physicians using these tools has steadily increased. In general, I would argue that this is a very good thing. Social media can be an excellent tool for disseminating health information, and I know many physicians who use it extremely effectively to that end. The American Medical Association came out with a set of guidelines for physicians using social media in November of last year, and it seems to share my positive view of the benefits that physicians can experience online. From the guidelines:
The Internet has created the ability for medical students and physicians to communicate and share information quickly and to reach millions of people easily. Participating in social networking and other similar Internet opportunities can support physicians’ personal expression, enable individual physicians to have a professional presence online, foster collegiality and camaraderie within the profession, provide opportunity to widely disseminate public health messages and other health communication.
But the guidelines go on to point out that things can also get a little hairy online if you let your guard down.
Social networks, blogs, and other forms of communication online also create new challenges to the patient-physician relationship. Physicians should weigh a number of considerations when maintaining a presence online:
(a) Physicians should be cognizant of standards of patient privacy and confidentiality that must be maintained in all environments, including online, and must refrain from posting identifiable patient information online.
(b) When using the Internet for social networking, physicians should use privacy settings to safeguard personal information and content to the extent possible, but should realize that privacy settings are not absolute and that once on the Internet, content is likely there permanently. Thus, physicians should routinely monitor their own Internet presence to ensure that the personal and professional information on their own sites and, to the extent possible, content posted about them by others, is accurate and appropriate.
(c) If they interact with patients on the Internet, physicians must maintain appropriate boundaries of the patient-physician relationship in accordance with professional ethical guidelines just, as they would in any other context.
etc…
So how are physicians doing with their conduct using social media? More >
How to write a good research blog post
Feb 24th
Travis’ note: Dave Munger has been a writer and editor for over two decades. He was the coauthor of Cognitive Daily, one of the web’s best-known research psychology blogs. He also co-founded ResearchBlogging.org and ScienceSeeker.org, which collect thousands of science posts from hundreds of blogs in several different languages. He is a columnist for Seedmagazine.com and and 3quarksdaily.com. Here are his thoughts on what to do, and what not to do, when writing a blog post about science.
Scientists and science journalists have all sorts of reasons for writing about science. They may want to share their latest discovery with the world, run a hypothesis by a critical audience, increase their personal profile, or show that they’re cut out for bigger things, like the gossip column.
What I’m going to talk about here is specifically how to write a good research blog post; the kind that might get picked as an Editor’s Selection on ResearchBlogging.org. We typically look for posts that will be interesting to a wider audience than just experts in a field. So it’s important to be clear and engaging, and to give your readers a little help understanding a study that’s probably out of field for them. This post borrows quite heavily from a post I wrote on Cognitive Daily four years ago, so you might want to check that post out too; there are some great tips in the comments section.
1. Find interesting research
This may seem like an obvious step, but there are a couple of problems with the way scientific research is often reported today. First of all, interesting doesn’t necessarily mean new. The major science journals like to make a big splash when their latest issue comes out. After all, the more people hear of them, the more likely they are to subscribe (or ask their library to subscribe). But the general public doesn’t spend every day poring over press releases to find the most up-to-the-second research. What’s interesting to the public is research that’s relevant to their lives — or research that’s just too cool to ignore. This might be a study that was done months or even years ago. If they haven’t heard of it, it’s news to them. The most popular article ever on Cognitive Daily reported on research that was two years old.
2. Make sure you understand it!
Take the time to read the study carefully. If you don’t understand some bit of methods or analysis, find out about it, preferably going beyond just a wikipedia search. This will obviously be easier if you’re in-field, but I often find that writers take some aspects of the research they’re writing about for granted. Question everything! I kept several psychology textbooks handy when I wrote for Cognitive Daily, and I try to verify everything I write on SEED as well with a non-wikipedia source.
I like to underline or highlight key sections of the document I’m writing about, but in general I avoid referring to it as I’m writing, except to verify facts and figures. In this way I’m sure I’m putting everything in my own words.
I also like to put the study aside for at least 30 minutes before writing it up. This helps me clarify my thoughts and come up with a fresh perspective on the material, because the next step requires a writer to approach the article in a new way.
How readable is your blog? A quantitative assessment of science blog accessibility
Dec 20th
Editor’s Note: Over the weekend Colin Schultz started a great discussion on his blog about the reading level of science blogs. He has graciously offered to share his thoughts on Science of Blogging. Also, just in case you were wondering, you can also check the readability of your blog by heading over to Google and typing in “site:YourBlog.com” and clicking on the Advanced Search link, right below the regular “Search” button. From the options under the heading “Reading Level”, select “annotate results with reading level” and presto! You have yourself an assessment of the reading level of your particular blog. And now here’s Colin.
What grade are you in?
If you’re an adult, that’s probably not a question you’ve had to think about in a while. According to the pieces of paper on my wall, I’m in 17th grade. If you have a PhD, you’re a bit higher. If you never had an opportunity at post-secondary education, then you’re in 12th grade, or lower still if you didn’t complete highschool. Your level of education isn’t a perfect measure of your reading ability, but it is a decent estimate.
[Ed: This is frightening, but I (Peter) have technically completed a total of 23 grades: high-school until grade 13 (old Ontario system), plus 4 undergrad, 2 MSc and 4 PhD.]
Now, let’s say that two weeks ago you got wrapped up in the excitement about the discovery of a bacteria that can supposedly use arsenic in its DNA. It was intriguing, everyone seemed to be really excited about it, and you wanted to know more.
So, where could you turn?
If you sometimes go by Dr., you probably had a decent chance at working your way through the original study. If you are early in your university career, Ed Yong had you covered. If you are still in highschool, and you wanted to know what other scientists thought of the research, then Carl Zimmer had a story just for you.
These suggestions aren’t based on the level of technical depth or the amount of detail in the science, but are instead based on the different stories’ estimated reading levels. One of the most common assessments of reading level (and the one that comes bundled with Microsoft Word) is the Flesch-Kincaid readability test. Using the number of syllables, words and sentences in a piece of writing, the test spits out the school grade for which the writing is best suited.
Newspapers, which try to make their writing as accessible as possible, often try to keep their reading level at or below that expected of a high-schooler. Improving readability makes it easier for people to understand the point, and will probably improve the odds of keeping the reader around all the way to the end of an article. Much like writing that over-uses jargon, if readers have to work to get through a piece of writing, they will probably just tune out.
Now, I’m not sure exactly how they do it (and it may not be perfect*), but Google has started letting you filter your searches by readability. The results aren’t as detailed as the Flesch-Kincaid test. Rather, a site’s content is split into three buckets: basic, intermediate, or advanced. More >
Science Bloggers: Diversifying the news
Dec 8th
Editor’s Note: When we said we wanted Science of Blogging to pick the brains of the best and brightest in the online science world, we weren’t kidding! Today, I’m excited to share a wonderful post by fellow Canadian, Colin Shultz. Colin is a science journalist, who regularly discusses fascinating topics on his blog and is uber-active on Twitter. In fact, Twitter, is how Colin and I connected. Today, Colin discusses the notion that science blogs may be a key supplement to traditional media in reporting science to the public.
So you know that old, sorry debate about science journalism versus science blogging? The one where the mainstream media are the legitimate suppliers of news about the world, and bloggers are resigned to being snarky commentators?
Or how about the one where blogging creates an echo chamber, where the diversity of sources withers, leaving people in a pool of ideology-reinforcing consistency.
Well have I got some news for you!
These arguments may not only be patently illogical, but rather, the opposite might be true.
In a recent study in the journal Journalism Studies, Gina Walejko and Thomas Ksiazek, both PhD students at Northwestern University, compared the sources that traditional journalists, political bloggers, and science bloggers each turn to when producing their posts. More >
Can you trust a science blog?
Dec 2nd
I recently came across a new editorial in Analytics Chemistry by Royce Murray entitled, Science Blogs and Caveat Emptor.
The main thesis of the editorial is that you can trust peer-reviewed literature, you can trust mainstream science news, but when it comes to science blogs – caveat emptor.
Murray states the following:
“I firmly believe that [peer-review] has served science well and that the scientific literature has provided generally reliable information and vast benefits to society over the centuries to the present and will continue doing so into the future.”
Thus, the past, present and future of science communication is in peer-reviewed journals, which he encourages should be judged on quality using tried, tested, and true measures such as journal impact factors.
When it comes to science blogging, Murray is much less romantic in his views:
“I believe that the current phenomenon of “bloggers” should be of serious concern to scientists.”
Bloggers should concern scientists, because, presumably, these two groups of people are separate entities. Scientists who also blog apparently do not exist.
Next, Murray gives away a bit of how distanced he is from the subject matter he is discussing.
“Bloggers are entrepreneurs who sell “news” (more properly, opinion) to mass media: internet, radio, TV, and to some extent print news.”
Over the years I have come to know numerous science bloggers, many of whom are also practicing scientists, and I’m not sure any of them would be captured by this definition.
As a scientist and a science blogger, I have yet to “sell news” to mass media. Fingers crossed, though. More >
Working with your Public/Media Relations office: A primer for researchers
Nov 29th
Editor’s note: As I video-blogged last week, our post on why scientists should blog got bounced around the web a good bit and resulted in a number of generous mentions on other blogs (check the trackbacks to view). Among these mentions was Andrew Careaga’s Higher Ed Marketing blog, a wonderful resource on all matters related to marketing and public relations in higher education. After a brief exchange via Twitter, Andrew graciously agreed to provide a post for Science of Blogging on how researchers can work with the public relations or media department at their host institution to get their research across to a wider audience. As the first official guest contributor on Science of Blogging, here’s Andrew.
* * *
Peter’s excellent case study on why scientists should blog led me to share my perspective on this subject. As a public relations/communications professional working in higher education, I think it’s fantastic that Peter shares his ideas by blogging. I wish more researchers would follow his lead. Frankly, it would make the media relations aspects of my job easier and probably more enjoyable.
The way I see it, researchers who blog about their work provide a public service. They’re sharing their knowledge with a broader audience than the readership of scientific or academic journals. (A very good Tufts University feature about academics who blog illustrates the value from their perspective.) And by responding to blog comments and exchanging ideas with other bloggers (as I’m doing here), researchers are able to interact with people beyond their disciplines.
Ideally, the media relations folks on college campuses are valuable partners for scholar-bloggers who want to get their research ideas out to the public. PR folks should not serve as personal publicists for certain faculty members – although most of us in the PR field know of a few professors who would love it if that were the case. Rather, we are partners in disseminating scholarship. We can do so not only by publicizing faculty research, but also by talking about the researchers’ own public-service blogging, and by pointing journalists and others to the researchers’ own blogging efforts.
So, how can researchers work with media relations staff? Here are a few suggestions. More >
Why all scientists should blog: a case study
Nov 23rd
I started blogging about 2 years ago.
At that time I was 2 years into my PhD and had a respectable number of peer-reviewed publications to my name.
I should have felt supremely proud to have joined the elite circle of publishing scientists.
Unfortunately, despite the publications, I longed to feel that any of my work was making an impact beyond the traditional boundaries of academia: peer-review publications and scientific conferences.
As I was not a full-fledged PhD with a ton of experience, my opportunities for media appearances and invitations to give presentations around the globe were appropriately limited.
So, with my good friend and colleague, Travis, I started a blog.
Our first post may have been read by a total of 6 people – assuming our girlfriends (now fiancées) and both sets of parents read the link we sent via email.
Fast forward to 2 years later, and our little blog is now hosted on the freshly launched PLoS Blogs network.
I have just published the final study from my PhD in the prestigious journal, Diabetes Care.
Despite the wonderful journal, presentations at international conferences discussing the work, and a message that I thought was rather important to the field, the work was met with complete silence. More >
Scientists: Publicizing your research gets you cited more often
Nov 18th
There is no shortage of benefits for scientists - young and well-tenured - to publicize their research beyond peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations. And yet, few scientists look beyond the pages of their discipline’s journal to showcase their work.
While all researchers should strive to translate their work for mass consumption, the scientist’s day is a long one, and often this task is overshadowed by more pressing issues of academia; grants, lectures, publications, conferences, student’s dissertations, etc.
Part of the problem is that many researchers fail to recognize the more tangible benefits of exposing their research to a greater audience.
Take for example the findings of a 2003 study by Vincent Kiernan in the Chronicle of Higher Education which clearly shows a strong relationship between the media exposure of a given study and the resulting rate of citation of that work in the scientific literature in the ensuing years. More >
