Four Reasons Doctors Worry About Social Media

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

I’m fortunate enough to spend a lot of time interacting with physicians, entrepreneurs, and investors on the bleeding edge of digital health – and it’s a consistently thrilling experience.

At the same time, the continuous exposure to the imaginative and the extraordinary can also be a bit deceptive. Self-associating groups, as Sunstein has discussed, tend to adopt relatively extreme views, and it’s easy to envision this happening in Silicon Valley in general, and to digital health innovators in particular.

Consequently, it was probably healthy, and certainly arresting, to attend a breakout session on social media at recent a medical conference; the audience members were mostly practicing physicians, seemed passionate about patient care, and were explicitly interested in learning about social media. Yet, most of the clinicians were not prepared to embrace it, and many were poignantly struggling to come to terms with a phenomenon they recognized as important, yet which viscerally troubled them.

Source: Forbes (link opens in a new window)

Categories
Health Care
Tags
public health