Capsule Minds: Take Your Real-World Self to the Digital Table
Dr. Howard Luks, advisor for the Mayo Clinic’s Center for Social Media, on how best to connect with patients online.
A few years ago, I started noticing an uptick in posts and discussions on what role digital footprints and online reputation was going to play for physicians. We knew it was just a matter of time before the Internet would become a key component in how our patients found and interacted with us. Yet even so, the shift is happening much faster than many of us anticipated.
Today, one in five Internet users has consulted online rankings and reviews for healthcare providers and treatments, and 72% look online for health information according to data from the Pew Research Center.
This means that even if your patients aren’t googling you, they’re likely to be going home and googling your diagnosis, prescriptions, and recommendations to see if these measure up to other content they’re seeing. In many ways, the Internet is perpetually cowboy country, and there’s a glut of false information about treatments and disease. That isn’t lost on users, and (as in the real world) they tend to trust each other and experiences they perceive as real and direct.
Patients want to know who you are and whether they can believe you, and for that they turn to each other — and to you.
This brings us to your role, and it’s actually quite simple. Take your real-world self to the digital table. People want to see and learn about you as much as possible, so put your biography and picture up on your hospital or practice website. Write things. And if you’re pressed for time, make a short, informational video. In fact, I find that patients who’ve seen my videos as opposed to written content have a much different interaction with me when they walk in. They’ve seen me talking at my webcam in a baseball hat on the weekend, so they come in knowing who I am and what to expect from me.
Equally important, enhance your credibility by selecting a handful of large, respected third party sites on which to have a deeper presence. This could translate to engaging in social media conversations, submitting your posts to content blogs, or uploading your full profile to a site that offers reviews from patients.
Seeing how your past patients or peers interact with you on sites that you don’t own establishes you as reliable and trustworthy — online and in person.
Digital reputation may have risen to the forefront faster than we’d expected, but only because our lives have digitized more quickly than we’d predicted. Approach your online presence with the same care and integrity that you do your real world one, and you may find that it’s not the stakes that are higher, it’s the opportunities that are greater.
Howard Luks, MD, is an orthopedic surgeon with offices in Westchester and Duchess Counties. He is an associate professor of Orthopedic Surgery at New York Medical College, and serves as chief of Sports Medicine and Arthroscopy at University Orthopedics, PC and Westchester Medical Center. Named one of the top Sports Medicine Physicians in the United States, by US News and World Report, he also serves as an Advisory Board Member of the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media. Follow him on Twitter @hjluks.
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