New York Doctors Have Become Social Media Afficionados

hellohealth.com

Dr. Khozin.

The worlds of medicine and social media are melding.

This week's issue of Crain's has a feature about New York doctors who were initially skeptical about social media, but are increasingly starting to use it as a resource.

Welcome to Health 2.0, where social media meets medical science. After lagging every other profession in going electronic, doctors are today flocking to blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and networks such as Sermo to learn, chat, commiserate and sound off about the state of modern health care. The implications for patients are significant as social media give physicians instantaneous access to an almost limitless pool of advice and problem-solving tools.

Take the case of Brooklyn internist Sean Khozin, who had a patient with disappearing libido. Dr. Khozin had mixed feelings about fulfilling this patient's request for a particular presciption to boost his sex drive, so he sought advice on the above-mentioned Web site Sermo, an online physician community where docs can exchange knowledge and opinions in real time: 

He soon had 10 responses, all of them agreeing there was no evidence for using the drug to treat the man's loss of libido. He ended up not prescribing it.

“The input was very helpful, and I discussed with the patient the fact that I got unbiased recommendations from colleagues,” says Dr. Khozin.

Dr. Khozin also told Crain's he's a regular on Facebook and Twitter, which he used back in April to disseminate information during the onset of the swine flu outbreak. (It's no surprise that Dr. Khozin is also one of the physicians affiliated with Hello Health, the Web-savvy Williamsburg medical practice that fuses traditional doctor's visits with instant-messaging, video consultations and online scheduling and records systems.)

And he's not alone. The piece also introduces us to 41-year-old urologist Richard Schoor of Long Island, who blogs as The Independent Urologist and runs his own online forum, the Physicians Entrepreneur Group; Mount Sinai Medical Center neurologist Errol Gordon, who regularly logs onto Physician Connect; and Dr. Alan Copperman, Mount Sinai's vice chairman of obstetrics and reproductive science, whose YouTube videos demonstrating the in vitro fertilization process have amassed about 40,000 viewers.

But even proponents like Dr. Copperman remain skeptical about social media to a certain extent. He told the magazine: “I worry that we almost get our message lost amid the noise if every thought comes pouring out in a blog or a tweet.”

[via NYConvergence]