On the Medscape Technology & Medicine Home Page, there's a list of medical weblogs (scroll to the bottom of the page) .. hmm … are weblogs useful and/or interesting to physicians? Hard to know. I've been getting more (mostly positive)feedback about this weblog lately ..
In the midst of a few changes to the structure of the templates I use for Docnotes, I turned off the tracking of my 'hits' for the past month or so.
Just turned them on again last week .. and I'm surprised to see that this site now gets about 200 unique visitors a day. I don't know how many of these visitors are physicians .. how many are not. I'll bet medscape would like to know. Their viability (and the viability of many otehr sites like theirs) relies on consistent traffic.
Let's think about that for a minute. What do physicians do?
- See patients
- Write notes
- Answer phone calls from patients and other physicians
- Look up information (patient related)
- CME
- Make phone calls to patient and other physicians
- Take call
- Go to the hospital
So if I want to capture the physician's eyes .. I want to provide something that the physician wants/needs.
- Messaging. No — not e-mail. Secure messaging. Medscape is one of a small number of sites that a majority of physicians have registered for. If I could securely correspond with patients (perhaps through a WebMD view?) and physicians (through a medscape view) .. I'd be happy. Yes. Other companies (relayhealth, mdhub, aboutmyhealth) have developed infrastructure to do this, but they lack the membership. I had a long talk this week with someone from RelayHealth. She called me because I'm one of the top users. (That's odd – I don't use it much. I probably get two or three messages a day.) They're thinking about enhancing the service. It doesn't need enhancement. It needs focus. I use 1% of the features – message from patient to me — and back. That's it. (more on this later .. off to see patients now) ..
