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Published by: David Nordella 11-01-2012  |  POSTED IN: Twitter Thursdays

A Physician and Twitter

 
Greg Matthews wrote a great blog-post for kevinmd.com titled “Physician use of Twitter: Examining the data”: http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2012/10/physician-twitter-examining-data.html.
 
(Haven’t heard of Dr. Kevin Pho yet? He has a lot to teach you about how to use social media as a physician: http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/about-kevin-md. He is to his media what Dr. Oz is to his media. Haven’t heard of Dr. Oz? Never mind.)
 
Greg was tracking data in a similar way to Dr. Katherine Chretien. Dr Chretien shared her results in a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=893850. Apparently Greg and his colleagues had been following thousands of doctors on Twitter for several years. They had created a rather robust database of over 400,000 Tweets from 1,400 doctors over five months in 2012.
 
Greg’s team found that their specialty mix was very close to the specialty mix in the U.S. No specialty represented more than a 3% variance from the mix of American physicians. They also had a near perfect match with the various parts of the country as well. Their study indexed within 4% of the physician population of 49 Sates in the U.S. The outlier was California, where physicians over-indexed by 7%.
 
I will let Mr. Matthews speak for himself about some of the many trends that his team discovered. “Having been satisfied that we had assembled a reasonable data set, we’ve spend the last two weeks poring through that data looking for insights and patterns. Here are a few of our top-line findings:
 
  • These are active users. They tweet over 2x per day on average. 
  • Twitter is a part of their work-day. More than 50% of tweets are sent between 9am and 5pm (in the physician’s local time zone)
  • They have an audience. 2/3 have at least 150 followers (the median is 306)
  • They connect to each other. More than 1/3 of the doctors are followed by at least 20 other doctors in the database.
  • The most-followed physician by those in the database was none other than Kevin Pho; followed by nearly half of the doctors studied.”
 
I will make my standard warning about Twitter and doctors. Twitter is not HIPAA compliant. Any social media should be used to discuss an individual patient’s condition/treatment. Twitter is a social media. Using social media for communication must be used with the knowledge that anyone could read about a patient’s personal health. Only secured communication channels as a password-protected private patient portal should ever be used to discuss specifics with a patient.
 
Twitter can be ideal for informing patients about general health trends. Titter is also excellent for building relationships with prospective patients and maintaining relationships with current patients. People do business with whom they feel comfortable and with those that they trust. Your patients are no different.
 
Did you realize that so many of your colleagues were using Twitter as a social media?
 
David Nordella, the Managing Director of Provider Finance Associates, LLC, has found Twitter mixes with his passion for improving the profits of Independent Practice Associations. Learn more about David:
 
@BeneficentGuild
The “Independent Practice Associations” group on LinkedIn
Thanks for reading. Jason.
P.S. Don't forget to subscribe below to this blog.
 
About Jason Ciment
Formerly an attorney and CPA, Jason has been working online since 1997. His columns on affiliate marketing can still be found on www.Clickz.com and his book on search engine optimization can be found at www.seotimetable.com.

This blog is published 4x per week and covers website design and SEO tips as well as a wide range of tips and advice for working and living online more efficiently and enjoyably.
 

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