Is Your Doctor Blogging About You? [Health News]

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photo credit: interplast

It began with WebMD and similar sites – patients started trusting and turning to Internet resources for medical information. Once patients began coming to the doctor’s office prepared with Internet-based diagnoses and medicine requests, doctors started paying attention to the Internet as well. Fast-forward to the present – not only do patients frequently turn first to the Internet for medical information before calling their doctor, they are now organizing into social networks like Wellsphere, DailyStrength and iMedix. We recently learned from sources like Mashable and TechCrunch that Internet heavies like Google, Microsoft and AOL are setting up systems for storing health records. And now, doctors are apparently getting into the scene with social networks and blogs of their own.

Digg recently directed me to this story at NPR about doctors who publish blogs. Apparently, according to the article, blogs published by doctors are on the rise and many people have concerns with this development. Physicians have been discussing patient information for years in journal articles, papers and books, so what is it that makes this story sensational and important to report? Is it the larger population and wider access Internet readership enjoys over published content? The fact that self-published blog articles are published faster than print material and not subject to any oversight (beyond that the law provides, of course)? Or is it just the Internet makes any story sexy and timely? Personally, I feel the issue is about the answer to this question – is it a doctor who blogs, or a blogger who happens to practice medicine? In other words, do we hold doctors (and perhaps other professionals, such as attorneys, who deal with confidential patient information) to a higher standard than anyone else who blogs?

Patient privacy seems to top the list of concerns, and the NPR article presents both sides of the debate. One the one hand, Dr. Deborah Peel, a psychiatrist and founder of the group Patient Privacy Rights, thinks these blogs may skirt close to invading patients’ privacy rights:

“The problem with physicians blogging about patients is the danger that that person will be able to identify themselves, or that others that know them will be able to identify them,” she says.

Peel’s group worries that information about a patient’s case could be traced back to the individual and adversely affect his or her employment, health insurance or other aspects of his or her life.

“If you [are a doctor and] are unhappy with the people that you’re supposed to be serving and taking care of, you probably need therapy,” she says. “You don’t need to be venting your frustrations in a public manner like that. That’s very inappropriate and unprofessional.”

On the other hand, Dr. Robert Wachter, author of a blog called “Wachter’s World,” disagrees:

“You might say we as doctors should never be talking about experiences with our patients online or in books or in articles.”

Wachter says taken for what they are — unedited opinions, and in some cases entertainment — blogs can give readers some useful insight into the good, the bad and the ugly of the medical profession.

This seems to be a movement that is growing, despite how you feel about possibly being the semi-anonymous subject of your doctor’s blog. The NPR article points to several particular blogs published by doctors, including KevinMD, which in turn links to many more. And privacy concerns will only get worse as “gated communities” like iMedExchange, who claim to verify all community members are themselves doctors, become more popular – the assumption will be, if all the readers are doctors, why even bother sanitizing the identifying information?

How about you – do you care if your doctor is blogging about you? Let us know how you feel in the comments and poll.

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