Health Care Innovation Forum:  Book Review, Establishing, Managing , and Protecting Your Online Reputation: A Social Media Guide for Physicians and Medical Practices, by Kevin Pho, MD, and Susan Gay,  238 pages.  Greenbranch Publishing, paperback, $64.00.

If you’re a physician seeking  solid advice on how to use the social media – Linkedin, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google, and blogs – to advance and enhance your practice,  this is your book. 

Its lead author, Kevin Pho,  MD, an internist in Nashau, New Hampshire,  is America’s premier physician social media voice.   The book rests on his experience gained from KevinMd.com.   Pho is extremely well-organized, not only in this blogging but in this book.  The book contains eight chapters.

One, Disrupting the Healthcare landscape

Two, Your Online Identity Today

Three, Defining Your Online Identity Through Social Meia

Four, Creating Your Digital Footprint

Five, Rating Sites

Six, Safeguarding Your Online Reputation

Seven, Professionalism in the Digital Age

Eight: Connect and Be Heard: My Journey from  Social to Mainstream Media

As a fellow physician blogger,  I’ve been impressed how skillfully Dr. Pho organizes his blog.  He solicits blogs from other physician bloggers,  prints  an online  newsletter review  of what has appeared in his blog, and composes his own blogs.  

 A  glittering galaxy of 26 testimonials  from health care physician and management luminaries precedes  the text.   Robert M.  Wachter, MD, professor and associate chairman, Department of Medicine at the University of California,  a notable blogger in his own right,  and cofounder of the Hospitalist movement, writes an illuminating foreword on how blogging and the social media has changed his world and the world of health care, which will never the same again.  Like Pho and his coauthor, Susan Gay,  Wachter  believes social media’s benefits outweigh its hazards, as long as one steers clear of its pitfalls.

Richard L. Reece, MD,  Medinnovationblogspot..com