Connecting with Physicians Online, a Study by Google

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In November 2009 Hall & Partner published a study sponsored by Google titled "Connecting with Physicians Online." (Here's the webinar on YouTube and here's the PDF of the presentation.)

The study's aim was to better understand how physicians use the internet in their clinical practices. As you'd expect from a study sponsored by Google, it was particularly focused on how physicians use search.

The study surveyed 411 physicians from a range of specialties (PCPs, endocrinologist, cardiologists, psychiatrist) and with a range of experience (2 - 30 years in practice) on their use of the internet in clinical practice. Additionally, various clinical scenarios were presented designed to mimic actual situations the physicians might encounter.

Here are some of the findings. All these percentages seem low to me.

• 86% of physicians have used the internet to gather health, medical, or prescription drug information.
• Only 21% of physicians who use the internet in their clinical setting access the internet for medical information in the patient exam room.
• 58% of physicians access the internet more than once daily.
• Only 81% of physicians use search engines. Of these, 92% use Google (naturally), but only 13% use Google Scholar. (I'm not certain where Pubmed fits into this — I presume it falls under "search engine.")
• Physicians most commonly searched online for general condition information and specific drug information.
• As a result of online research, physicians made a change in medication or initiated a treatment about 30% of the the time.
• 78% (only 78%?!) believe the Internet has made practicing medicine easier.
• 8% of all physicians clicked sponsored links, but 21% of psychiatrists clicked on sponsored links. (Analyze that.)
  
• 92% of physicians clicked on the first search result.

To delve further into the summary PDF, click here.

Dr. Schwimmer practices Nephrology in New York City and also blogs at Info-Stream.

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Laparoscopic Surgery Performed at 4X HD

The holy grail of resolution is not high definition video, but telepresence — resolution so good it feels like you're looking through a window, not a TV set or a monitor. Resolution so detailed you feel like you are there.

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Finding Doctors and Health Care Professionals on Twitter

Image by luc legay via Flickr

A little over a year ago, before Twitter was the tech/pop culture phenomenon it is today, doctors like myself had a problem: how do you identify other health professionals on Twitter? (At the time, there must have been at least dozens. Dozens.)

This was the first solution. In retrospect, it was hilariously cobbled-together:

This is a feed containing the conversations of all known doctors and medical students who use Twitter: http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorsontwitter. (If that doesn't work, you can try the original feed from Yahoo Pipes instead.) Technical details, for those interested: I used this list of doctors/medical students on Kidney Notes, ran each person's Twitter feed through Yahoo Pipes, then burned a FeedBurner feed.

When FriendFeed debuted, I created "The Doctor's Room," which was populated by both Twitter feeds and RSS feeds of physicians. Unfortunately, the "room" feature was poorly designed by FriendFeed (which has since been acquired by Facebook). Like the Yahoo Pipes experiment, the FriendFeed room was an educational failure.

A month ago, Twitter finally debuted the "lists" feature, allowing each user to create subscribable lists of other users. Below is a sample. (For clarity, the second column is the number of users in the list, the third column is the number of users subscribed to the list. Got it?)



While not a perfect solution, lists are a simple way to discover health care practitioners on Twitter. (Finally.) Services like Listorious have also appeared which use the Twitter API to create searchable lists of lists.

For easy reference, here's a list of some of the more popular lists of doctors on Twitter:

• @enochchoi/doctors
• @enochchoi/moredoctors
• @drwalker_rph/healthcare
• @hrana/twitter-doctors
• @scanman/medtweeps

(You can find me at twitter.com/JoshuaSchwimmer. The full lists of lists which include me is at twitter.com/JoshuaSchwimmer/lists/memberships. This post also appears on The Efficient MD.)

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