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.

An Obligation to Use Social Media?
According to a survey from Health Dialog, only 25% of people searching for health information online verify the reliability of the source. This is disturbing when you consider the amount of inaccurate health information online, and that, according to estimates from Health Dialog, 58% of people will make a self-dianosis from it.

Take the report linking vaccines and autism as an example. Even though the research is fraudulent, parents still question whether vaccines can lead to autism. This confusion has been fueled by sensationalism on the Internet.

To reduce the amount of flawed information online, doctors need to share reliable resources, address misleading claims, and most of all, help patients understand the issues accurately. Twitter, Tumblr, blogs and the like are perfect channels for this. In the case of the vaccine-autism link, we could mitigate the false information in search results if more doctors used social media to engage with their patients on the issues that concern them.

How Do We Get More Doctors On Board?
The opportunities and obligations are clear, but if we want to see more doctors taking up social media, we need address some obstacles.

For starters, doctors need incentives to dedicate time to social media. We can’t expect a pediatrician working fingers to the bone to go home and start sharing web links. Altruism will only take us so far. We need modern medical coding that supports today’s tech- and web-savvy offices, and we need the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and other payers to get behind this.

As reported in HealthLeaders Media, the CMS acknowledges that, when appropriate, codes can be used to pay for time spent discussing a patient’s health conditions. They specify it must be a face-to-face encounter. Why not an online encounter? The CMS could offer reimbursements for communicating with patients online, through social media. At the very least, they should launch a demonstration project to test the viability of this.

In addition to overcoming time concerns, we need to overcome liability concerns. Many doctors avoid social media because they’re afraid of breaking HIPAA privacy rules. These concerns are mostly overstated, but until we address them, we’re not getting doctors on board. So, we need documentation. We need the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and healthcare organizations to establish guidelines on using social media. The rules aren’t different from other forms of communication – we just need to clearly define what physicians can and can’t say online. Here is a list of several hospitals that have developed participation guidelines. We need more of the same if we expect to assuage fears of liability.

Finally, we need training. There is a misunderstanding of what social media entails. How it works, how to create messages and posts, what to say in them. We need to educate doctors about the various tools and platforms available, and how these tools can come together to work for them.