February 23, 2012
HIMSS12: Q&A with Dr. Wendy Sue Swanson
We’re pleased to welcome Dr. Wendy Sue Swanson to our HIMSS12 booth (476). Dr. Swanson is a mother, practicing pediatrician and blogger at the forefront of conversations around how social media can improve health care. Dr. Swanson will be discussing how social media and technology enable care providers to create strong connections with their patients. We had a chance to sit down with her for a quick Q&A session.
Should social media functionality be integrated into an EHR? What would be the best way to accomplish that?
Absolutely. As an enthusiast, yes. It needs to be integrated thoughtfully though. It needs to value both the caregiver’s and patient’s time and doesn’t distract from their other priorities. You want physicians in a typical workday to grab a social tool and communicate efficiently with their patient population. We don’t need another flashing light or button to distract us from providing exceptionally passionate and attuned care. The easy answer is yes. The challenging answer is yes, but it needs to be an extremely careful design. And more, I would suggest, what can be done better is to figure out a social tool that exports to other social media channels that fit with a patient’s preference. For example, a tool that allows for efficient, HIPAA-compliant conversations that are an opt-in basis, where the communication can go into a folder or in a direct message. So that each channel where people live can be a repository of communication.
In your experience, how has the popularity of social media affected the provider-patient relationship?
There is a changed set of expectations. You know that within seconds, you can go online and ask health questions and get a response. Sometimes, within minutes you can get a health response from an expert, or at least a source that reflects expertise. It has changed the way individuals acquire information. 78 percent of adults use the Internet to search for health information, it is the third most common thing we do on the Internet. It has changed out we get information and it has quickly changed the expectations of the clinic. If you can go online and get a response within minutes, but have to wait 2 days for a response from the physician’s office, which seems absurd. That is not going to work in a community that now expects an immediate response.
What are the biggest barriers to increased adoption of social media in health care? How can we work to overcome them?
One is time. You can’t just simply ask extremely busy, tapped out clinicians to do more for free. We can’t ask them, after seeing 30 patients, to spend hours online curating and sharing information. The second barrier is a concern about privacy and professionalism and concerns about the tools in which they are using. A number of physicians use social tools, but I don’t think Facebook has had a good record in the press when it comes to privacy. The tools feel uncomfortable, even if you aren’t sharing PHI. It’s uncomfortable to share anything. Reticence is normal and it has to be directly confronted.
With social media sites like Google+ and Pinterest continuously popping up, what does the future look like for health care social media?
It is difficult to know where to live online. My advice is to live where you like to be. When you first reach for your phone, where do you go first? There is something about that tool drawing you in, for physicians in particular, if you are going to use social media to network and share experience. There are more and more sites popping up, for example Doximity, a physician-to-physician social media channel. Physicians are alarmed about privacy and the public seeing what they are writing. HIPAA-compliant, board-certified required sites allow physicians to communicate and reflect insight. It is a safe place to start. I would suggest that people using social media channels to provide information, try a number of tools, but don’t start out with sharing health information. Get comfortable with it. You can inform yourself in advance of things that can be successful and things you don’t want to encounter. Using social media for something as powerful as health can be valuable.
Dr. Swanson is a practicing pediatrician and the mother of two young boys. She's passionate about improving the way media discusses pediatric health news and influences parents’ decisions when caring for their children.