It seems for many doctors Twitter activity is an outpost connected to some other online place. 48% of physicians on Twitter link to their blog according to Katherine Chretien’s recent study published in JAMA. Doctors apparently understand that different types of information flow better in different channels.
If you had asked me I would have estimated that this Twitter-blog association was much lower. Of course I like to believe that I understand the social doctor better than I actually do. And this is why we need original research like Katherine Chretien’s.
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I haven’t seen the study. It’s behind the JAMA paywall. But I’d like to know if the author @MotherinMed saw the percentage of physician bloggers who were also on twitter. That would be a very high percentage. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was greater than 90%.
Bloggers were and are the social media pioneers in the healthcare industry. This study just reflects that.
I don’t think that can be pulled from this data but you’re probably right. Perhaps the most interesting population is the one that we might less expect to be here: those without blogs or other places where they can easily spread ideas. While this is really interesting, I’d like to know alot more about these doctors and what brought them to Twitter. I think it would reflect some really interesting things.
Thanks for your comment. And sorry about the delay. I had a little Troll in my midst and had to temporarily use moderation. I don’t usually do that.
@ Vijay – we don’t have that data–all data driven by Twitter profiles. But would be interesting.
@ Doctor_V- totally unscientific, but just scanned our data and those without blogs are fairly diverse in terms of specialty, #followers, but those with links to their clinical practice (17% of total sample), rarely have blogs. I suspect Twitter is largely being used for marketing purposes in a subset for their clinical practice. One thing we couldn’t fit in the space limitations is how the Twitter sample differed from US physician distribution data:
“Compared to 2008 US data on physician characteristics and distribution, the specialties of surgery (15% vs. 11% actual) and emergency medicine (6% vs. 3% actual) were overrepresented in our sample. Plastic surgeons represent 7% of US surgeons, but 36% of surgeons in our sample. Internal medicine and its subspecialties (11% vs. 22% actual) were underrepresented. The remaining major specialties were within a percentage point of actual US distribution. “
I’ve been following your blog updates and very much enjoy them. Quite practical info with similar experiences I’ve seen in my practice.
As for your lastest post, I see many younger patients in my Chicago practice. They have iphones, ipads, and sit on the computer much of the day while at work. As the iphone generation gets older, they become the physicians of today. It’s amusing, encouraging, yet scary at the same time. I’m confident that if I were to blog on acid reflux, my patients would follow the advice and read the blog more routinely. Unfortunately, to keep up with the “times”, Doctors needs a greater web presence than ever before.
“I suspect Twitter is largely being used for marketing purposes in a subset for their clinical practice. One thing we couldn’t fit in the space limitations is how the Twitter sample differed from US physician distribution data:”
Hospitals engaged early on around the marketing + external communications opportunities that FB and Twitter provided. Physicians may have joined that bandwagon too. But we are on to something more . . . patient communication, action learning and collective intelligence are the next phase of healthcare SM. Getting CIOs of healthcare systems to embrace SM inside the firewall is the current barrier in my mind, and then providing clinicians w/ SM competencies.
I think almost all people who have a blog post from their blog to twitter, because it is as simple as enabling a wordpress plugin. Twitter helps in spreading an idea, but now a days people just don’t click on links,because the amount of information flowing via twitter is enormous, so it takes great skill to create a good heading worth clicking. I think 48% is just too low as it accounts for only half of medical bloggers linking to twitter. The percentage will be higher among technology bloggers because they spend most of their time in front of a computer screen and is very familiar with latest tools to spread information.
Just to not that Katherine’s study was only looking at doctors with more than 500 followers, not all doctors on Twitter.