• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

33 Charts

  • About
    • What is 33 Charts?
    • Bryan Vartabedian MD
  • Blog
  • 33mail
  • Foci
    • Social/Public Media
    • Physicians
    • Patients
    • Hospitals
    • Information
    • Process/Flow
    • Technology
    • Digital culture
    • Future Medicine
  • The Public Physician
Social/Public Media

It’s No Longer About You

July 12, 2013 By Bryan Vartabedian · Reading Time: 2 minutes

PublicPhysicianEarlier this month, I spoke to the assembled incoming residents at Baylor College of Medicine about the importance of their public presence. The talk centered around a couple of core points: how to avoid some of the common mistakes that could impact their careers going forward; and how to begin to think about their digital footprint as a tool for creating professional opportunity.

While our residents will see and hear more about the importance of their public presence and networked medicine during their time at BCM, orientation is a good time to introduce big-picture concepts.

One concept I emphasized with this fresh batch of doctors:  It’s no longer about you.  For Baylor’s new residents and those at other medical schools, these thoughts:

This is an amazing time in medical history to be starting your career. We’ve been an analog profession for the past few hundred years. Now we’re transitioning into digital medicine and it is changing everything about what it means to be a doctor. One of the most powerful forces changing us is the way we communicate. You represent the first generation of digital natives to become doctors. You’ve grown up accustomed to the concept of real-time communication and transparency in dialogue. You’re accustomed to the nowness of mobile communication.

But things became different when you were handed your diploma. And at that moment when you posted your status on Facebook, you became a public physician. The idea of being a physician in the public space carries significant responsibilities.

As doctors, we’re different. We’re different than our friends in marketing, sales, law, finance, and just about everything else. We carry our patients’ stories and we’re entrusted with their most intimate information. How we carry ourselves and what we do with that information before our community, patients, and peers affects our ability to be effective.

There’s a core tension in play with doctors and their public role. It concerns the balance of our individual rights and the responsibility to our community. The democratization of media has given us the capacity to say and share just about everything, but there are patients and peers who count on us. Most problems with doctors and new media center on this balance. As the intentional management of your reputation becomes part of your professional strategy, this balance will hopefully become more important to you.

When you took the Hippocratic Oath, it stopped being all about you. From this point on, the concerns of your patients will always lie above your right for free expression.

For most of their lives, these new graduates have had little real accountability for their public dialogue.  But with their new role, their lives are about to change. While the granular “do’s and don’ts” of Facebook represent important elements of medical education, understanding the broader element of our responsibility to the networked public needs intentional discussion.

Originally posted on Wing of Zock in my Socialized Medicine column.

Related Articles

  • Doctors Using Social Media: No Longer New
  • Should We Screen Doctors for Social Judgment?
  • Mistakes Doctors Make Online

Tagged With: Medical education, Social media

Related Articles

  • Doctors Using Social Media: No Longer New
  • Should We Screen Doctors for Social Judgment?
  • Mistakes Doctors Make Online

Primary Sidebar

Bryan Vartabedian, MD

Bryan Vartabedian, MD
Bryan Vartabedian is the Chief Pediatrics Officer at Texas Children’s Hospital North Austin and one of health care’s influential
voices on technology & medicine.
Learn More

Popular Articles

  • The Fate of Fired Cleveland Clinic Resident Lara Kollab
  • Cures Act Final Rule – How It Will Change Medicine
  • 12 Things About Doximity You Probably Didn’t Know
  • Should Physicians Give Their Cell Phone Number to Patients?
  • Doximity Dialer Video – Telemedicine’s Latest Power Player

Sign up for 33mail newsletter

Featured Articles

Health Care and the Visibility-Value Continuum

Doctors and social media: Damned if you engage, damned if you don’t

100,000 Connected Lemmings

Doctors and the Endemic Culture of Permission

Yes, Doctor

  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

Footer

What is 33 Charts?

With a mashup of curated and original content that crosses the spaces of digital health, media, communication, technology, patient experience, digital culture, and the humanities, 33 charts offers unique insight and analysis on the changing face of medicine.

Founded in 2009 as a center of community and thought leadership for the issues doctors face in a digital world, 33 charts was included in the National Library of Medicine permanent web archive in 2014.
Learn More

Foci

  • Digital culture
  • Digital Health
  • EHR/Health IT
  • Future Medicine
  • Hospitals
  • Information
  • Patients
  • Physicians
  • Process/Flow
  • Quality
  • Social/Public Media
  • Technology

Copyright © 2023 · 33 Charts · Privacy Policy