There are many things you can learn about a doctor using social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others. Once you have confirmed licensing and board certification credentials, the most important information you can gather relates to a doctor's attitudes about his her or work, and his or her personality. Since we end up in long-term relationships with many of our doctors, these are important aspects to choosing the right ones.
There are a variety of approaches for getting that information, too. You'll want to search both for the doctor's participation in social media and/or for comments made by others about that doctor.
Some important points before we begin searching:
- Be sure the person you find during these searches is the specific doctor you are looking for. Doctors can have similar or identical names. Double check names, locations, even hospital affiliations to be sure you have the right one.
- Once you find the doctor you are looking for, do what you can to verify that the information was actually shared by that doctor. Bogus Twitter IDs or Facebook pages aren't unheard of.
- Some doctors hire someone else to handle social media for them. You'll want to be sure it's the doctor him or herself handling their own social media and not a social media-hip young person tweeting or Facebooking instead. If the doctor isn't handling it him or herself, you'll learn more about the social media professional and less about the doctor.
- Some doctors work for large practices, hospitals or other facilities that invoke specific rules about participation in social media. The information you find posted by a doctor on social media sites may have been constrained by those rules. If so, there will likely be a disclaimer in a bio or description of the doctor stating that anything posted represents him or her, and not their employer. You'll want to take that into account when making your assessment of his or her personality, interests and attitudes, knowing your doctor has limits on what he or she can say online.
- Beware the doctor who wants to sell you products or services. Follow the money. If a doctor wants to sell you products and services through social media, and you make an appointment to see him or her, then you'll very likely get the same hard sell in person, too.
