Dr Google to new level
1 in 6 doctors search for their patients
TELLING your doctor you have only four drinks a week when you actually love a bender might not be as clever as you think.
If you openly share information about your life online, there is a good chance your doctor knows the truth.
An Australian study found one in six medical practitioners admitted to going online to look for information about a patient – on par with doctors in the US and Canada.
The same number of doctors also believe it’s okay to look up publicly available online information about a patient as part of regular clinical practice.
In an emergency such as a suicide attempt, 37.8% of doctors said it would be appropriate to search patient information online – 35.% were neutral and 26.7% disagreed.
The internet brings new ethical and legal dilemmas to health care, each with vastly different outcomes.
If a doctor finds a picture of a patient waiting for a liver transplant drinking alcohol, they could intervene to stop the operation but searching online could be useful for ER doctors when patients are unable to provide information due to being mentally unwell or intoxicated.
Researcher James Brown, who conducted the Australian research in 2014, said more needed to be done to develop stricter guidelines for doctors in the online realm.
“We found poor literacy from the Australian Medical Association and very informal guidelines, which makes it easy for the doctor to make the wrong call,” Mr Brown said.
He said as a younger generation of doctors who grew up with the internet started climbing the ranks, there would likely be more integration of social media and healthcare.
A journal article by University of Washington clinical psychologist Keren Lehavot explored a case of a man in his late 20s being forcibly brought to hospital by police after updating his profile picture on Facebook with what looked like a gun pressed to his head.
As the man was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and had a history of suicide attempts, his doctor made the decision to hospitalise him after seeing the picture on his page.
The man denied wanting to end his life and voiced his disgust at the intrusion of his privacy and involuntary hospitalisation. When police performed a search on his apartment, they only found a pellet gun.
Columbia University professor Paul Appelbaum said cases such as this inadvertently set new legal precedents for healthcare.
“The standard of care is developed by the clinical community itself,” he told Nautilus.
“What most people do, or at least what a substantial number of people do, becomes a standard of care.”
Prof Appelbaum said building a profile from the digital footprint of patients could also have repercussions.
“By going online and putting what we find in the chart – whether that’s a summary or a cut-and-paste excerpt or a screenshot – we are creating a new kind of medical record information,” he said.
“Unlike some of those sources – which may be hard to find, or ephemeral, and may ultimately disappear – medical records are forever.”
The psychiatrist said as third parties accessed medical records, the data could play a role in legal proceedings regarding accidental injury, child custody disputes or criminal cases.