Originally posted on the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, November 23, 2011
Can doctors and other healthcare professionals adapt to connected world around them? If we look at other periods of dramatic change, medicine has thrived.
Let’s step back 160 years to the mid to late 19th century:
Can doctors and other healthcare professionals adapt to connected world around them? If we look at other periods of dramatic change, medicine has thrived.
Let’s step back 160 years to the mid to late 19th century:
In that short time period, new scientific discoveries changed how we look at health and how we treat it. It took until the early 1900s to crystallize a model in the U.S., the Flexner Report, but that approach to medical education for doctors helped guide the profession to many successes in the 20th century.
There are new challenges, and how healthcare professionals interact is one of them. Early research shows that medical professionals are currently struggling to integrate social media use with the standards of medical professionalism.1-3 Guidelines are now available from multiple organizations, and Dr. Mark Ryan has a good review of this topic here.
It's still unclear how to strike the right balance between openness and tradiational medical professionalism. But I am confident that we will find ways to adapt because we must – necessity is the mother of reinvention. Perhaps not all social media tools will be helpful, but I think doctors and other medical professionals will evolve to remain relevant. What do you think?
Citations
1 Chretien KC et al., “Online posting of unprofessional content by medical students”, JAMA 2009;302:1309-15
2 Thompson LA et al., “The intersection of online social networking with medical professionalism”, J Gen Intern Med 2008;23:954-7
3 Lagu T et al., “Content of weblogs written by health professionals”, J Gen Intern Med 2008;23:1642-6
There are new challenges, and how healthcare professionals interact is one of them. Early research shows that medical professionals are currently struggling to integrate social media use with the standards of medical professionalism.1-3 Guidelines are now available from multiple organizations, and Dr. Mark Ryan has a good review of this topic here.
It's still unclear how to strike the right balance between openness and tradiational medical professionalism. But I am confident that we will find ways to adapt because we must – necessity is the mother of reinvention. Perhaps not all social media tools will be helpful, but I think doctors and other medical professionals will evolve to remain relevant. What do you think?
Citations
1 Chretien KC et al., “Online posting of unprofessional content by medical students”, JAMA 2009;302:1309-15
2 Thompson LA et al., “The intersection of online social networking with medical professionalism”, J Gen Intern Med 2008;23:954-7
3 Lagu T et al., “Content of weblogs written by health professionals”, J Gen Intern Med 2008;23:1642-6