Medical experts have suggested that social media may be a great tool for training surgeons.
Some patients, however, are experiencing unexpected side effects.
As the New York Times reported, patient data from Stanford Hospital was posted and remained online for nearly a year.
“You can’t make this stuff up,” Kevin Sack, the author of the article on the Stanford case, tweeted Wednesday night.
In an online world of over-sharing, one of the last bastions of privacy has been medical data. Like nearly every other profession, however, medical professionals now want to see what social media can do to enhance patient care.
Two University of Buffalo medical school surgeons got some buzz within health-care industry earlier this week when they suggested social media is “well-suited” for training surgeons.
Social media could be used to transmit the most up-to-date medical information to surgeons and students around the world, said Philip L. Glick, MD, vice chairman and professor in UB’s Department of Surgery and professor of pediatrics and obstetrics and gynecology, and Sani Yamout, MD, a fellow in pediatric surgery at UB, now training under Glick at Women and Children’s Hospital of Buffalo.
“Surgery next industry to move into social media realm? Certainly hadn’t thought of that one,” @SocialVictory tweeted Wednesday.
Physicians should jump into online conversations about health care, which are often dominated by lay people and inaccurate information, the surgeons said.
“A surgeon’s greatest legacy is his or her trainees. … And a lot of the training consists of passing on information, lessons learned and wisdom to the next generation. Twitter allows us to dramatically scale up our ability to do this,” Glick said in an interview with Healthcare IT News. “When I post something on Twitter, all the pediatric surgeons, trainees and colleagues in the country and the world can see it instantly.”
Of course, that could mean even more breaches of sensitive data going forward.
The biggest burden is the legal implications, and organizations like the American College of Surgeons and the American Medical Association are already working on guidelines for how physicians should use social media, particularly when it comes to patient interaction.
In the Stanford case, a spreadsheet with private medical data from nearly 20,000 emergency room patients was sent to a job candidate by a billing contractor as part of a skills test. Hoping to receive assistance on the test, the applicant posted the data on a tutoring Web site, where it remained for almost a year.
“Not good,” Bill Dean posted on Twitter after reading the Stanford Hospital article.
Over 300 health-care organizations have experiences medical data breeches since September 2009, when a new federal law required hospitals and health-care providers to report data breaches involving 500 patients or more, according to CRN and the Department of Health and Human Services. The largest occurred when Science Applications International Corporation said backup tapes with 4.9 million patient records were stolen from an employees car.
“’Accident’ or ‘Stupid’? This is why people have legitimate #privacy concerns w/ #EHR‘s, #EMR‘s, #healthIT,” Ano Lobb tweeted.
Photo by jfcherry