Patients Googling their Doctor – A Coming Trend?

I came upon this interesting blog post the other day.

When Patients Googlestalk Their Doctors

Posted by Jacob Goldstein

Old doctors barely know what the Web is. Baby docs just out of residency would rather take a job in the Arctic than get rid of their Facebook page. And all of them are likely to get Googlestalked now and again by creepy patients.

That’s what a couple of Harvard psychiatrists say (albeit somewhat less glibly) in a commentary in this week’s JAMA.

“Many physicians over a certain age never envision their patients Web searching” for personal information about their doctor, write Tristan Gorrindo and James E. Groves. The older docs (naively) believe that “being absent from the Web is the surest way of avoiding disclosure of personal information on the Web.”

…..

Given how easy it is to go online and find housing records, divorces, bankruptcies and whatever pack of slanderous lies your bitter ex wrote on his/her blog, there’s only so much anybody — M.D. or otherwise — can do. Still, for the benefit of old and young alike, Gorrindo and Groves lay out a few common sense tips to help docs manage their online identity:

• Create your own Web page with basic information about your training and your practice.
• Search for yourself regularly. Use the form “John Q. Smith” or “John Smith, MD,” including quotation marks
• Go after sites that post slanderous material. (This WSJ story lists private companies that, for a fee, help deal with this sort of thing.)
• On social networking sites, use privacy controls to keep juicy bits out of sight of the general public.
• If you think a patient is searching for private information about you online, bring it up with the patient.

More here:

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/07/08/when-patients-googlestalk-their-doctors/

This is a trend that may alarm clinicians.

While it seems perfectly reasonable to check if a clinician you plan to consult has any adverse commentary available on the Web it would seem very poor if patients start to abuse the information they find.

Potentially worse are sites the purport to rate clinician performance but which allow totally un-moderated and potentially damaging posting.

This is discussed further here.

Online Doctor Stalking: America’s New Pastime?

Kathryn Mackenzie, for HealthLeaders Media, July 15, 2008

We hear a lot about patient privacy and rights. With high-tech heavyweights like Google and Microsoft getting into the online personal health records game, it's likely that publishing medical information online will become the norm, rather than a futuristic pipe dream. Of course, patients will still want to know that their private information won't be accessed by the prying eyes of bosses, friends, neighbors, or relatives. And, through advertising pushes, test cases, and studies, the industry is working very hard to prove to patients that their medical data will remain private.

But what about the healthcare provider's right to privacy?

Many providers, especially those of a certain age, may not have any idea just how much of their personal information is easily accessible online to anybody—including their patients.

Anyone who comes into contact with patients, whether it be a physician or hospital executive, is accustomed to the dependency of patients in a clinical setting. Yes, we look to our doctors to cure what ails us, but we also want them to offer us comfort and support when we're feeling scared or sick. Some of us also want to know a little about our primary caregiver's history. Where did she graduate from, what do other patients think of her, where else does she practice? With the click of a mouse and few keystrokes, it's a breeze to get that information online at sites like ratemds.com and physicianreports.com. Unfortunately, it's also that easy to access far more personal information. Just by entering my doctor's name in Google or one of the dozens of other search sites, I can find out everything from where my doctor lives to her marital status to how much mortgage she pays.

More here:

I guess this issues is like all sorts of other relatively new technologies. There are often un-intended consequences which it takes time for an appropriate way of dealing with such problems to evolve. I suspect we are at the front of this curve!

David.