Health 2.0 - Medicine 2.0: Videos, Blogs, and Doctors

Medicine 2.0: Videos, Blogs, and Doctors


Brian Klepper, a health care analysis with a new blog, www.brianklepper.net, just sent me a newspaper piece from the Silicon Valley/San Jose Journal, dated Nov. 2. Brian’s blog is worth visiting – it shows energy, insight, and passion. Besides, it contains a dedication to him from me in my book Voices of Health Reform.


But back to the newspaper article. It reports,



• A deal between Medem, Inc, a San Francisco firm headed by Ed Fotsch, MD and backed by multiple medical societies, offering web-based services to 70,000 doctors, and YouTube.



• The fact that doctors use email more than other profession, after engineers, are moving online fast and furiously, using social networking programs, blogs, wikis, podcasts. Videos, an specialized search engines – anything floating out there in cyberspace – to talk to patients and to each other.


• The realization that doctors are lonely. It cites Daniel Pallestrant, MD, Sermo CEO, who says, “What Sermo seems to have tapped into is a longing by physicians to regain peer collaboration..”



As a consequence, a wave of online deals aimed squarely at doctors is sweeping over the Web.



• In May, Sermo signed a deal with the AMA, to foster doctor collaboration, and in October, another deal with Pfizer, allowing the drug firm to listen into anonymous conversations with doctors.



• Fligz, Inc, struck a deal with HealthGrade, permitting its 3 million visitors to tour medical facilities and to view doctors at work.



More and more, doctors are using online videos, “click and view,” to substitute for text and to show visually who they are and what they do.



Dmetri Kruglyyak, of Trusted MD, a medical blogging network, says Medicine 2.0 is all about doctors showing their human side by creating an image of themselves as persons.



Bloggers have become the thought leaders of medicine. Johnson & Johnson, Inc has organized blogger events, and Humana, Inc., has created a website for bloggers (ChangeNow4helath.com). Med Gadget, a blog created by a San Francisco anesthesiologist, Michael Ostorwsky, has attracted drug firms, device makers, and software companies.



Opines Ed. Fotsch, MD, “ There are a lot of market forces behind this. It’s an obvious next step. A third of office visits aren’t about the physical exam. They’re about getting information. A one-on-one visti is really not very efficient. What we’re trying to do is make medicine more consumer friendly.”



Summary



Hold onto your hats, you practitioner doctors,
Web videos are becoming your patients’ proctors.
The new videos are really all about you.
And facts about you patients can view.
Through videos you’re becoming patient advisors.