Medical Blogs Can Help Promote Practices, Health Businesses
September 18, 2008 by News Reports
Filed under Health Blogs, Medical Blogs
Medical blogs are emerging as the public face of health care, but bloggers should be aware that patient confidentiality rules still apply, according to authors of the first US study to look at medical blogs and patient privacy.
With more doctors and nurses becoming medical bloggers, researchers have identified a need for universities and professional organisations to provide instruction and guidance on how to blog in a way that maintains professional and ethical standards.
In the new study, the research team headed by the University of Pennsylvania’s Dr Tara Lagu looked at the burgeoning area of medical blogs to see if patient privacy was being respected.
Previous research into medical blogs has tended to focus on the benefits of blogs providing health information. The new study, recently published in the Journal of Internal Medicine, examined medical blogs and looked at how often blog authors commented on patients, violated patient privacy or displayed a lack of professionalism by not revealing conflicts of interest.
The team defined weblogs, or blogs, as a journal-style website with entries posted over time. With an estimated 70 million blogs on different topics and a worldwide average of 120,000 new blogs created every day, identifying all blogs created by health professional was an impossible task. Read more