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Twitter for Physicians / Doctors
Whether you prefer to call yourself a doctor or physician, you may be wondering if Twitter is for you. Everybody is talking about twitter but is there anything in there for you – the busy doctor? Can Twitter help your practice, can Twitter bring more business, improve patient loyalty and raise your stature in the community?

Well let’s step back and see what physicians with thriving practices have done over time. Besides keeping themselves abreast of current drugs and research, they have maintained an excellent relationship with their patients. Some have done it through newsletters while others make their staff call patients periodically just to check on them. Some mail birthday cards and season greetings to their patients.

In today’s world though, there are a lot more intriguing options. What if a doctor’s office becomes a micro publishing house, scours newspapers, journals and research publications, extract relevant news / findings, compile them and send them to their patients. Patients will get fresh and relevant content and will be very appreciative of the good doctor. That will be perfect but can you imagine the resources that will take. Even if you limit yourself to a staff of two or three for this purpose plus the relevant hardware and software, you are talking about $9,000 to $10,000 a month. Add it up and that is $108,000 to $120,000 a year, a significant chunk of change even if you have a thriving practice.

What if you could do all of that for just a fraction of the cost? What the book ‘Long John Twitter’ explains in great length, you can use five or six different applications and blend them together to:

  1. Scour news sites, blogs, journals and research sites and gather information. You define what kind of information you want to collect. Let’s say you are a cardiologist and you want to gather information that includes keywords like heart disease, cardiology, cardiologists, statins, Lipitor, stents, bypass, and so on.
     
  2. The system you set up collects all this information and feeds them to a second system where the headlines are shortened. The URLs (links) to the source of the article are also shortened. Remember Twitter allows you only 140 characters to tweet.
  3. The system is now ready to send out the shortened headlines and URL’s to your followers and patients.
  4. You define how often you want the tweets to go out. You don’t want to harass people with 10 tweets a day nor make them forget you with one tweet every quarter. You will find the right balance over time.
  5. When a follower / patient receives your tweet with the headline and URL, if they click on the URL, they are transported to the original source of the story and they can read all the details they want.
  6. As you keep sending out these useful tweets, your patients and those who are not your patients but following you will start having greater confidence in you. After all, you are the one who is directing them to all these studies related to their health. You must be reading them yourself too. Aren’t you?
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