![]() ![]() Its conclusions about online privacy foreshadow the equilibrium most contemporary patients and providers have reached: “here will inevitably be several well-publicized incidents of people being harmed by public releases of their health care information-those exceptional cases will shape the debate,” the report predicts. (“Weaknesses in Web browser and search engine technologies,” they observe, “will limit the appeal of the Internet to health care providers.”) But overall, the forecast proved remarkably prescient. Some of the authors’ predictions fell short-notably, they failed to anticipate The Google. In 1999 the California HealthCare Foundation issued a report titled “The Future of the Internet in Health Care: Five-Year Forecast,” by Robert Mittman and Mary Cain of the Institute for the Future. Nearly 60 percent of the health care professionals surveyed by InCrowd report having no social media access in clinical settings at work. Doctors near the finish line tweeted accounts of the attack to local emergency personnel six minutes before official announcements were made, giving staff critical time to prepare for the arrival of victims.īut until the utility of online sharing in health care contexts becomes obvious to hospital operatives, they’ll continue to view it the way the rest of us regard twerking-if we ignore it long enough, surely it will just go away. Social networking was also helpful on the day of the Boston Marathon bombing. Despite his reservations, Warraich defends the practice, pointing out that doctors have used online intel to gauge suicide risk, discover relevant undisclosed criminal histories, and contact the families of unresponsive patients. Some doctors have misgivings about employing social media in the service of patient care: “What if one finds something that is not warm and fuzzy?” frets resident physician Haider Javed Warraich in a post this week on the New York Times’ Well blog. The FSMB cites this grievance as an example of how “use of social media and social networking may undermine a proper physician-patient relationship and the public trust.” According to the Federation of State Medical Boards, one patient took offense at a blog entry in which a physician branded another patient “lazy” and “ignorant” for repeatedly failing to control her glucose level. The immediacy and presumed anonymity of online sharing make it easy for a patient to become a doctor or nurse’s chief complaint. Names are withheld, but providers may inadvertently supply other details that allow patients to be identified. More than 10 percent had handled an episode like the one at Northwestern Memorial, involving what the survey refers to as “online depiction of intoxication.” A study by QuantiaMD reports that 13 percent of physicians admit to having used public online platforms to hash out specific cases with fellow practitioners. About 30 percent of state medical boards report having fielded complaints of “online violations of patient confidentiality,” according to a recent survey published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. ![]()
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