Your accountant can email a specialist for advice about a specific issue in your tax return. Your doctor, however, doesn’t necessarily have the same access to easy collaboration. There may, however, be a Facebook-like solution in the wings.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPPA) prevents doctors from sharing patient information without “reasonable safeguards.” For the most part, this shuts down the instantaneous email exchanges through which other professionals collaborate. Physicians can consult with each other about a patient’s condition via email, but they
can’t involve medical test results or a patient’s medical records in the discussion.
While it’s good that patient privacy is protected, these restrictions have contributed to the fax machine’s mainstay as a major form of communication between doctors. The rest of us are bouncing messages between us instantaneously while
doctors are receiving faxes. One medical center
estimates it receives roughly 50,000 and sends another 10,000 fax pages each month.
A new doctors-only network called
Doximity wants to free doctors from the fax machine and bring social media into the field. The company started as a LinkedIn for doctors, and it quickly grew to 30,000 members. Recently it added a Newsfeed feature that, like
Facebook, allows doctors to post messages to colleagues with whom they are connected on the platform.
Doximity Founder and CEO Jeff Tangney says the idea of the feature is to give doctors a safe place to collaborate.
“You can get fired for being a physician on Facebook,” he says. “It becomes really difficult to collaborate all of these things when you can’t send a patient photo or any discussion of a patient legally over email.”
A doctor in California, for instance, has a teenage patient who recently came down with an uncommon infection, so he contacted another doctor in Texas who had led studies on a treatment for that infection. Another specialist from Boston chimed in, and together the three came up with a new way to treat the patient.
In the digital age, this kind of collaboration makes a completely underwhelming story. But in the medical field, it’s something of a difficult task to pull off. On Doximity, Tangney says these doctors could freely exchange details because the communication is HIPPA-compliant.
While there’s no official HIPPA-compliant certification, the company says it has worked with independent consultants to ensure it isn’t violating the law. There’s a three-step verification process for doctors to establish a profile on the site that involves a credit check and a verification of credentials against the American Medical Association database. There is also a multiple-step sign-in process similar to one you may have encountered at your bank’s website.
Tangney didn’t say how many doctors were currently enrolled in the program, but he did say that it was more than 7% of physicians in the U.S. That should put it at about 40,000 doctors.
That participation fuels Doximity’s business model — locating health specialists for non-medical advisory roles and billing for their time — but it also opens up the possibility of social media shaping medicine as it has other professions.
Thumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, pixdeluxe
