Driving In Traffic - Blogs as Patient Education

A trackback led me to an inspirational post in the Driving In Traffic blog called Blogs as Patient Education.  It's a great justification of the cost and effort involved in getting started blogging - in the crass world of commerce her position would be called a "business case" for blogging by healthcare professionals.

I think Carol's bullet list about what physician blogs can do is great. It doesn't quantify the return on investment the way a business case would do, but given the time-is-money nature of medical practice, it's intuitively obvious there is value in the ability to deliver more information than you can afford to provide in the 10-12 minute visit.

For physicians, as with other professionals, it's important to extend your blog beyond just the circle of your patients - there is great value in bringing other healthcare professionals into the conversation. Connecting with your peers pays off for you as well as for your patients - not only do they get more and better counseling from you and the support they will get from their peers, but in addition they can listen in on conversations between multiple experts that will provide them with more insights than you can afford to provide on your own.

But as Carol pointed out in this and her earlier post called Understanding the Aversion to Medical Blogs, it's a hard sell for anyone, even the experts in social networking technologies. I had a discussion today with Dr. Lada Adamic (a physicist and social network theorist, not physician) about the difficulty in getting clinicians involved in the world of online social networking. She has been in discussions with numerous members of our medical faculty about the potential value of social software and has met with dismissal of the ideas at every turn. In a profession where time management is crucial and prioritization is an ongoing activity, the lack of a business case for the new technologies is a fundamental barrier to adoption.

My informatics group has had a bit more luck in our corner of the med school, partly because we have demonstrated the value of social software in coordinating Center-wide IT-related efforts, but mostly because we have a visionary faculty lead who is very open to new ideas, IT-wise and otherwise. His group conducts clinical trials on the value of interactive websites in the treatment of fibromyalgia and the use of PDAs as a way of capturing research data from patients in situ wherever they may be. While his group hasn't worked with wikis and blogs, it's an easy leap from their prior experience to these concepts.

After the value proposition is understood, another major barrier I have seen in others and experienced in myself is bafflement over what to do and when and how to do it when trying to get started with blogging. I got beyond that this year with a blogging bootcamp course from Bud Gibson of TheCommunityEngine (http://www.thecommunityengine.com). His course is a crash spin-up in business blogging, but most of what he teaches is applicable to professional blogs as well. The value of tools like SiteMeter, del.icio.us, Furl, Technorati, and g-metrics isn't intuitively obvious, nor is the need for seeking out birds of a feather and participating in the life of their blogs, but with a little guidance it all begins to make sense.

I'm working on a synthesis and re-formulation of what I learned from him that I intend to publish both online and in print soon, to help give health professionals and other knowledge workers the basic skills and techniques of blogging. I saw 20-some novices become skilled and highly motivated bloggers over the course of six Saturday afternoons (with tons of homework in between of course). Bud can't be everywhere all at once, so I'd like to see the insights he inspired in me and my classmates propagated in as many ways as possible.

It would be great to see more healthcare bloggers, especially (selfish view here) from the research side where I work. I think the way to make that happen is a combination of the "why" and the "how" - the business case and the step-by-step instructions.

The one thing nobody can provide is the motivation required to start posting and continue posting until one gets noticed and an ongoing conversation gets uderway. Once that happens, the blogger feels less like a stranger in a strange land, and everything gets a lott easier.