Should Doctors Friend Patients on Facebook?

Posted by Peter McEllhenney on 7 October 2011 | 0 Comments

Tags: Social Media in Medicine

The American Medical Association reports that nearly 90% of physicians now use at least one social media site.

Which raises an important question: Should doctors friend their patients on personal Facebook or other social media accounts?

The answer from physicians for professional reasons – and from me for marketing reasons – is “no”. Here’s why.

Doctors should decline friend requests on their personal Facebook pages

Many physicians decline friend requests from patients out of concerns about liability and privacy. The AMA reports that 33% of doctors have received friend requests from patients. Doctors have decline 75% of these requests.

Further, organizations like the British Medical Association and the Ohio State Medical Association are concerned about how friending patients on personal social media accounts could make it more difficult to maintain appropriate doctor-patient relationships. (Read this August 2011 AMA article.)

I think these arguments are strong. I will add from a marketing perspective, everything doctors do openly on the web influences their professional images, and evenly perfectly harmless personal information can dilute those images.

Ideally, doctors want their patients to remember them for their compassion and skill more than for their vacation photographs or barbeque sauce recipes.

Doctors should create a professional Facebook page (if they have time)

The AMA articles say it can be appropriate for doctors to create professional Facebook pages, and I agree.

But doctors need to be willing to commit 20 to 30 minutes every day to their professional Facebook pages to make them work. For many of our physician clients, that’s a lot of time in an already busy day.

If you don’t have that time, I don’t recommend you create a page for your practice. Ignoring patients on Facebook is much worse than not having a presence on Facebook at all.

For ideas on how to use social media to grow a health practice, see our post on “3 Ways Facebook Helps Doctors Get Patients”.

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