Are healthcare professionals looking at your Facebook page? The most likely answer is ‘no’, since GPs, nurses, pharmacists and other healthcare professionals (HCPs) are busy enough as it is without wanting to look up their patients on the internet. However, doctors in the UK are now being encouraged by NICE to ask patients probing questions about how much they drink. If doctors are rewarded for meeting targets, what is to stop them from looking at Facebook or running Google searches for patients they are most concerned about?
Of course, it is unlikely many HCPs would break the trust of a patient by researching them online as confidentiality is such a core value of their daily work. But if online information proves useful to help GPs and others target key patients, it is not completely out of the question. While this might be an interesting thought, worrying too much about this would no doubt be over the top, and we don’t want to go too far, but what if we take the opposite perspective?
If we did live in a world where HCPs intimately knew the lifestyles of patients, treatment would surely be more successful. We still operate largely on a very old fashioned consultation model. Is it time to ask whether a two minute discussion between a patient and a HCP is enough to really give a strong idea of what symptoms could mean? Are patient records on outdated NHS databases enough? There are numerous online tools for symptom tracking, but nothing that is as widely used as Facebook. Perhaps doctors looking at your medical Facebook equivalent could actually improve public health on a large scale…
Tags: alcohol, confidentiality, doctor patient confidentiality, Facebook, NHS, NICE, patient doctor confidentiality, privacy