So the other night I was contemplating my dilemma about switching from Typepad to WordPress. I floated the question out on Twitter and received within 10 minutes about 13 responses (via feed and DM) on what I should do. Most of these responses were from smart folks who know more than I do. Not all agreed but the majority offered similar advice. There was some consensus on how I might approach the situation.
Why don’t doctors do this? There are 60,000 Fellows in the American Academy of Pediatrics, for example. Assuming all maintained Twitter accounts, at any given time there would be a boatload of babydocs available for dialogue. Then consider the case of a solo doc the Texas Panhandle who finds himself with a simple dilemma or question that needs immediate feedback. Depending on the human filter tailored by that pediatrician, consensus would be close at hand.
Doctors should be crowdsourcing. And crowdsourcing for our benefit and the benefit our patients, not as a Pharma-fueled vehicle for monetization. Given microblog space limitations and the obvious concerns of patient privacy, this platform would work for simple, direct questions that don’t disclose unique patient information.
Why wait? If every pediatrician in the AAP jumped in today we could give it a dry run.
{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
What do you mean by 'crowdsourcing'? I agree and disagree with the idea. I like the idea asking for references, resources, good guidelines and other such tools. As much as I'm sure it happens, advice from fellow colleagues might be a dangerous leap to take online. Just because there are a lot of people does not mean that the best answers will be the ones you are given. Also it is hard to tell which is the best advice because you will be biased towards picking the answers given soonest.
I do think the idea of collective knowledge is something we need to harness, but let's think a bit harder about what that means. Hopefully with a bit of thought we can find the most effective and meaningful ways to use it.
Rob
Thanks for your comment. I'm referencing a term used in social media circles to reference mass collaboration. I have real concerns about patient to patient crowdsourcing in certain circumstances. And agreed that we can't generalize its use with docs. We're all going to learn the rules as we go here and certainly there are appropriate questions to launch on a microblog and there those that aren't. Our dialog will define the rules I believe.
Funny you should mention this. I'm in the midst of reading The Wisdom of Crowds and am thinking about how to exploit crowdsourcing in my own work. Although I am not a physician, it seems to me that medical diagnosis via crowdsourcing (of other medical professionals) could really improve the quality of medical care.
Child neurologists already do this with an e-mail discussion list for tough cases. It's been around for a while. Perhaps its a little easier because pediatric neurology is a much smaller community.
I think mass collaboration on microblogs may have a very different role than formal case presentations on a listserve or traditional blog. Interesting to see it all evolve
There are two key distinctions between Twitter and blogs. First, Twitter forces you to be succinct. Second, Twitter is immediate: you send and receive updates in real time. This is why it could be very useful for crowdsourcing.
Thanks, Greg. Cud'nt have said it better. In medicine there are things better handled with detail but there is a role for this short form interaction
I've always thought that Twitter would be an excellent way to "curbside" peers. I hope it facilitates a lot of good knowledge transfer and helps a lot of patients.
The possibility for Twitter to facilitate both to increase peer communication and even doctor-patient communication (utilizing Twitter to update patients about waiting room times, for instance, http://tinyurl.com/dy2tq3) is in its infancy.
The data is fairly clear Slotnick et. al. have shown the physicians generally rely on trusted resources (previously used) for clinical information and answers to problems. Using the wisdom of crowds may not yield answers the learner wants.
This sounds like SERMO, a web community for doctors to ask and answer questoins amongst themselves. Doctors get rated to based on the quality of their responses.
I'm all about crowdsourcing, but there are hurdles that need to be crossed yet. Twitter is already being diluted by advertisers and people who stand in nad tweet for other people. We need to develop a "trust" metric for social media. Social Networks, in their traditional sense handled this by bestowing trust primarily to your first level links and somewhat to your "loose links" (2nd level – friend of a friend). Unfortunately now people have hundreds of people as "friends" and tend to recommend people they dont know to other people they dont know…silly. So, how do we incorporate enough trust in a network that I can take advice from someone I really dont know on a personal health topic? It could be what Jason and Mark commented – we use social media to become aware of *potential* solutions to our problems and then access more *trusted* sources to validate the suggestion. Would love to hear more ideas.
One of our aims with Cases Network is to create a forum where doctors can ask each other such questions. Our database of case reports will provide a searchable repository of peer-reviewed cases as a starting point for discussion, but we want to enable doctors to have 'real time' discussions on individual cases not included in the database too.
Interesting to consider whether 140 characters offers enough scope to describe a patient's case in a useful way – although signs and symptoms can fairly easily be distilled to short notes, the narrative of the patient's individual experience is very important too.
Elizabeth (@CasesNetwork)
Great post. I also think that prediction markets on healthcare issues with participation by physicians & clinicians along with patients would provide useful crowdsourced views on healthcare trends. For crowdsourcing to be "wise", a combination of diverse, independent and decentralized contributors is essential.
Elizabeth, I agree that case presentations are a critical social function for physicians. Agreed that 140 characters is no where near sufficient for case discussion. Straightforward issues needing immediate feedback may work well in this setting
I think we aren't leveraging the power of crowds enough yet. I love the idea of doctors collaborating and sharing on twitter (or some other media). I've written an article recently and I'm currently working on a presentation for some med students. I can't ever imagine writing an article or doing a presentation again without getting feedback from "the crowd." It makes a decent presentation good and a good presentation great.
So, I have to ask why this is still a typepad blog? WordPress is so much better.