We now know that our past, present, and future patients are looking for medical information on the internet. Unless our practice is full, we are also looking for well educated motivated patients to join our practice.
The potential patients are looking for content. We have the expertise (content). The question then becomes how we put this content online to satisfy the needs of all persons concerned.
Assuming you have a website online, you have a vehicle for posting content. Hopefully, you have a blog or section associated with the website where you can add content fairly easily without having to go through your website designer.
The easiest content to add is a question and answer section. There are a number of questions that get asked on a routine, often daily, basis by patients. You can answer these questions individually as single posts over a series of days/weeks depending on the number of questions and the extent of the answers.
The second easiest source of content is the explanations you provide about choices of treatment for a particular disease process. For surgeons, there may be two or more surgical options. For internists, there may be a variety of medications that could be used or different treatment options; e.g. conservative vs. surgical.
Patients are looking for this information online. It is definitely better for this type of material to be provided by a medical professional rather than a writer submitting an article that is poorly researched and for which they lack the understanding that medicine is truly an “art and science.”
