as my contact with patients and doctors on the wards increases and the funny or cute or disturbing or enlightening stories continue to pile up in my head, i have been wrestling with the question of how to share it all with you. i don’t want to get in trouble and i certainly don’t want to get anyone else in trouble… but there must be a (legal and ethical) way to share the day-to-day experiences of my life and my work.
so, i spent a bit of time stumbling around the internet and found a few guidelines from Clinical Cases & Images:
- Do not blog anonymously. List your name and contact information.
- If your blog is work (or school)-related, it is probably better to let your employer (or dean) know.
- Do not start blogging right away after you join a company. Check the corporate culture. See if blogging will fit in the current work environment.
- Enquire if there are any blogging guidelines. If there are, comply with them strictly. If there are no guidelines, try to establish them.
- Let your boss know that you are planning to blog about your job. Ask him/her to check you blog to make sure that it is OK.
- Write as if your boss and your patients are reading your blog every day.
- Use a disclaimer, e.g. ” All opinions expressed here are those of their authors and not of their employer. Information provided here is for medical education only. It is not intended as and does not substitute for medical advice.”
- Get your blog accredited by the Heath on the Net Foundation
- Comply with HIPAA
If it is done right, blogging can be a positive thing for a company. It gives a human face to the corporation. Scoble is a perfect example of a how a blogger can improve the public image of a company like Microsoft, which has not been getting much of a good press for a long time.
Most of the 100 or so doctors who blog use pseudonyms like “Red State Moron” or “GruntDoc”. Unfortunately, you cannot stay anonymous. If somebody tries really hard, they will discover your identity. The best solution is not to post anything that can embarrass you, or your patients. If you are blogging about your patients, make sure that you comply with the HIPAA rules.
To stay out of trouble, always ask yourself: What if my patients are reading this? What if my colleagues are reading it?
Be honest and respectful to others. And once again, remember the HIPAA rules.
notice how many times HIPAA was mentioned? forget about job security. it’s easy to tell the most important guideline for writing online about patient interactions is privacy.
i think i have everything in that list covered pretty well. in hindsight, i should have approached MUA’s Dean personally to let him know about the site instead of how i assume he found it: Googling “Medical University of the Americas” and noticing my name on the first page of results. oh well.
my next struggle will be deciding what to do with this site once i finish clinical rotations and am cleaning myself up to look sparkly and shiny for residency applications. do i keep blogging as an MD with multiple disclaimers and non-disclosures? or do i leave my academic journey behind like Graham Azon did?
what are your thoughts? i’ll probably do what i want regardless of what you say (ha!) just because i’m plain bored of sitting on the edge of the pool.
Write like your patients and your boss are reading it!
I can’t emphasize that point enough. In fact, I know that my higher-ups read my blog, so I always keep that in mind. (I’ve been told on more than one occasion that they very much enjoyed my blog.) Whenever I write about patient related topics, I always try to change the details or use more than one patient’s details to make it so that no single patient could ever say, “hey, she’s talking about me!”
With regard to the residency thing, that’s a tough one for me. I’ve chosen to keep writing up until this point, but residency is on the horizon, and I will soon have to decide what to do about that.
I’d like to believe that if a residency director read my blog, they’d actually be more apt to choose me rather than the opposite. But that’s probably just wishful thinking. In a perfect world, that would be true. But this is not a perfect world!
Please keep writing! Your blog has kept my head in the game and hs been such an inspiration when I feel like im the only one studying and trying to make it on this path! Keep it up! :)
I say you pretty much have to keep writing. It is a good way to stay in the right state of mind and keep on the right path. Writing was suggested to me by a little bird, and it really seems to help. I really appreciate your blog (almost as much as talking to you) and think it will do nothing but increase your chances of that perfect residency!
Write to keep me happy.
At my Canadian school the dean’s advice was to have have nothing but the most benign information available about yourself online. Come CaRMS time someone *will* look you up and the more info that is out there the more there is to interpret in a negative way. You have to remember that the generation of physicians on selection committees are of a more conservative generation and may look askance at even having a blog let alone sharing personal information. Our generation may think nothing of living with someone without being married (information clearly obtainable from your site) but this is something that could count against you (not to mention that it is also sharing information that in interviews would be considered illegal questions, ie. are you married, do you intend to have kids, etc.). It is obviously such a big part of who you are, but you may want to think about password protecting the site or disabling it temporarily once the application process is started.