Doctors face their own digital examination
Exactly 40 years ago English punk rock band The Jam put out their iconic album All Mod Cons. With incendiary guitar, angry young man lyrics and almost-cogent politics, All Mod Cons positioned The Jam alongside The Clash as the thinking person’s alternative to The Sex Pistols.
One of my favourite Jam tracks is The Bitterest Pill, a cynical condemnation of an old girlfriend lost forever to another man.
Last week medical doctors in New Zealand were similarly cynical and condemning about a pill they were being forced to take in the form of a dedicated social media platform.
Www.whitecoat.co.nz is an online platform that allows people to find healthcare practitioners based on patient reviews. Whether it’s a chiropractor in Christchurch or a dentist in Dunedin, Whitecoat lets consumers know their options, how much it will cost and how other patients found their delivery.
The company was established five years ago in Australia, and today has information and reviews relating to more than 210,000 health professionals, with the stated aim of improving the transparency and wellbeing of its users. Now it’s set up shop in Godzone. While the media has nicknamed it the ‘‘TripAdvisor of healthcare,’’ the healthcare professionals are less welcoming.
Ian Powell, director of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, described the service as inherently unreliable. He maintains that no consumer is able to make any real proper judgment call on a surgeon and the whole service is dubious.
He even went so far as to say that the service was potentially harmful for doctors professionally or personally, and that the platform was very unfair.
To me this seems reactionary and pointless. All the site does is add ordering, aggregation and verification tools to what is already available on Facebook, or Twitter (#doctornightmare).
And to infer that doctors and specialists – who are in business to make money and must meet the needs of consumers to have a sustainable business – should somehow be exempt from consumer ratings smacks of elitism.
Frankly, if I was a doctor I’d much rather have comments about me made in a forum where I can easily find, respond and perhaps improve my engagement with my patient-customers, than try to hunt them down across the whole web.
What’s more, the site seems to have a reasonable moderation policy and the ability to get vexatious comments removed, which is more than you’d get on most social media websites.
And because it’s a New Zealand entity, it needs to comply with the Harmful Digital Communications Act. This includes the need to respond to complaints within 48 hours to be covered under the safe harbours provisions.
If I was representing the interests of doctors I’d be looking at real digital challenges, and the opportunities hidden within, rather than slagging off a small social media operation. I wouldn’t need to look very far.
Last week American pharmacy giant Walgreens launched a new online platform that allows patients to talk with doctors and specialists through telehealth company MDLIVE and schedule online dermatology appointments.
The new Find Care Now platform wraps medical services around people’s lives, rather than making people fit their lives around traditional ideas of doctors.
About a month earlier Amazon, the 10-tonne e-commerce gorilla, acquired online pharmacy company PillPack for about NZ$1.5 billion after Walmart had unsuccessfully made an offer.
This, together with rumours that Amazon is looking at introducing a step change in online diagnosis and prescriptions, suggests more radical change is not too far away.
Meanwhile, there are many examples of companies starting to do an Uber for doctors. A good example of this is www.heal.com, where you load in a few details and less than an hour later a qualified medical doctor turns up at your home, hotel room or your work to diagnose ills and prescribe drugs.
Suddenly, doctors’ surgeries could become empty altars to yesteryear.
Across the ditch, Australia already has a couple of digital hospitals – hospitals where all the health professionals can access all your information digitally, and bedside devices capture all your vitals and save them directly into your secure online medical record.
A record that lives in the cloud and follows you around, allowing you to change doctors in less time than it takes to give your dentist a red face on Facebook, or Whitecoat for that matter.
So there’s a powerful amount of change just around the corner, and health professionals would be well advised to worry less about a red face and more about whether they will still have a business.
Put it all together and I reckon the bitterest pill is still to come for the members of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists.
And as the lyrics suggest in the Jam song, for some of them the wheel of fortune may be about to break.
Suddenly, doctors’ surgeries could become empty altars to yesteryear.