Welcome to the Augs Fellows webinar series. I'm Dr. Emily Aldrich, moderator for today's webinar. Today's webinar is Leading with Your Best Self, Leveraging the Internet and Power of Social Media and presented by Dr. Amy Park. Dr. Park will present for 45 minutes and the last 15 minutes of the webinar will be dedicated to Q&A. I'd like to take a moment to introduce Dr. Park. Dr. Park is the Section Head of Female Pelvic Medicine and Reconstructive Surgery in the Obstetrics and Gynecology and Women's Health Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. She has dedicated her professional career to advancing the field of urogynecology through research and education. She specializes in minimally invasive treatment of urinary incontinence, pelvic organ prolapse and pelvic floor disorders. Dr. Park obtained a bachelor's of art degree in history at Brown University. She then earned her medical degree at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. She completed her residency training in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Pittsburgh McGee Women's Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania followed by fellowship in female pelvic medicine and reconstructive surgery at the Cleveland Clinic. She has held several leadership roles at the national level in the field of gynecology, including the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists, American Urogynecologic Society, American Association of Gynecologic Laparoscopics and Society of Gynecologic Surgeons. Before we begin, I'd like to review a few housekeeping items. This webinar is being recorded and live streamed. Please use the Q&A feature of the Zoom webinar to ask any of the speakers questions. Use the chat feature if you have any tech issues, Aug's staff will be monitoring the chat and can assist. At this time, I will turn it over to Dr. Park. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Aldrich. And I really appreciate the opportunity to speak today at this Aug's Fellows webinar. And I really want to commend everybody for putting together this amazing series. I know my former fellow, Dr. Chang and Dr. Aldrich are very active in this. And I think that this talk is actually, maybe for many of you going to be old hat. But in any case, I'm here to talk today about leading with your best self, leveraging the internet and the power of social media. These are my disclosures. And the objectives of my talk are to review strategies physicians can use to leverage their online presence as change agents. So I just wanted to put up this slide about the 2019 AAMC Public Opinion Research Highlights about what Americans say about the nation's medical schools and teaching hospitals. And essentially to summarize at a high level, most people, teaching hospitals and medical schools favorably, it's two thirds to three quarters. And I just wanted to highlight here, they're having increase in trouble finding a physician and the numbers have increased significantly from 2015. And now it's a third of patients are having trouble finding physicians. And then essentially, like I said, about three quarters of the US public has a favorable view of medical doctors. And then about eight, 10% have negative opinions regarding different domains that medical doctors do. And basically, it sounds good except for when you consider where the rank is in terms of how the public trusts their doctors by country, the United States actually ranks 24th. And you can see a lot of the Scandinavian countries and European countries, the trust in physicians are a lot higher. And actually this has prompted a lot of wringing of hands. If you look at here, about three quarters of Americans have great confidence in medical leaders. And according to this article, only 34% do. So I just summarize it, it's kind of some conflicting data, but I think people still trust their doctors, but to quote Ronald Reagan in terms of how people feel, I think the public thinks trust, but verify. And where do they go? Well, where the myths are cresting this techno social revolution, there is a plethora of information on TV and online, but more and more people are going to the internet and to websites. There's information-based groups like, or websites like WebMD and Mayo Clinic. And then there's patient support groups with websites like the Hister Sisters. And then there's social media like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. However, with the rise of going online to these websites and social media, there's been a rise in health misinformation. And actually this is even outdated for 2021, but this was from two and a half years ago, April, 2019. And this was an editorial in JAMA talking about counteracting health misinformation and talking about what is the role of medical journals and physicians. And this article highlights crowdsourced lies, fake experts, and misleading leaders, and states that there's no editorial oversight or curation online. Fake news spreads faster than the truth on social media. Negative attitudes about science have risen lockstep with ultra-nationalist sentiments and emergence of populist leaders and movements. And for those disadvantaged, despairing, and understandably distrustful of government, alternative truths align with shared skepticism about scientific medicine and belief in traditional remedies. So in this table, you can see here that physicians and medical journals have a role in containing the dissemination of misinformation. And we need to work together to promote general understanding of medical science, communicate about common misconceptions using websites, digital media, town halls, and conventional print and broadcast media. Prepare the next generation of health professionals to navigate a world of truthiness and pseudoscience and debunk myths and discredit purveyors and to engage in direct rebuttals of medical misinformation using the variety of media platforms that I discussed above. And we need to also discuss the credentials and the conflicts of interest that people may have. And this is, again, a little dated, but in 2019, the World Health Organization stated as one of the top 10 threats to global health in 2019 as vaccine hesitancy. And this is even before the rise of COVID. So just preventable diseases, generally speaking, and then COVID, we've seen this explode. And again, this is a tweet that I made from last year, but this is a doctor at Nationwide in Columbus. He's an allergy doc. And he was talking about the rabbit hole of biases, conspiracies, and echo chambers during the COVID-19 pandemic. And I think I'm not the only one who said this, but medical misinformation is also a pandemic. And it's gotten so bad that the Federation of State Medical Boards, which I think all of us have had to submit verification of our license, et cetera, they just issued a statement, July 29th, 2021, that in response to a dramatic increase in the dissemination of COVID-19 vaccine, misinformation, and disinformations by physicians and other healthcare professionals on social media platforms, online, and in the media, that you are basically risking disciplinary action by state medical boards, including the suspension or revocation of their medical license, if you engage in such behavior. It has become such a problem. So I wanna argue, we should follow Willie Sutton's law. Many of you know he was a famous bank robber, go where the money is. And the medical corollary is go where the patients are. It doesn't really matter what you, I, we think, it matters what they think. And we need to go where they're going. And that's online. And basically, like I said, this techno social revolution nears societal shifts where there's cord cutting. We are all watching on Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Max, et cetera. There's no more centralized networks or even cable. The decline of newspapers and print media means that we're going online, and it's fragmented in terms of where we're getting our information. Many companies are exclusively marketing online via Google ads and on social media, especially Facebook and Instagram. So it's, I think we all are sort of aware how much people are using the internet. In terms of online searches, 80% of internet users, almost 100 million Americans, have performed an online search for a health condition. And that's increased from, it's about 60% in 2001. And two thirds are looking at specific disease or medical conditions, or, and half are looking at medical treatments and procedures. And the health-related searches are surpassed only by email and researching products and services. So this is just an example of one patient-oriented website on a medical condition. It's called Hyster Sisters. It's a woman-to-woman hysterectomy support. And there's hysterectomy checkpoints. You can see that there's half a million members, five million posts, 600,000 threads. So there's a lot of hysterectomy stories on this website. Additionally, patients go to Dr. Google for health information. I just did a non-scientific search on urinary incontinence, pelvic organ prolapse, fibroids, endometrial cancer. And the top websites were mayoclinic.org, like in terms of the page one Google search, WebMD, MedlinePlus, womenshealth.gov, health.harvard.edu, and cdc.gov. And I just wanted to take a moment to talk about this mayoclinic.org. And this is a super interesting article on why Mayo Clinic dominates social media and healthcare. Well, in 2010, they founded the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media. And their vision statement, admission statement basically is talking about how Mayo Clinic believes individuals have the right and responsibility to advocate for their own health, and that it is our responsibility to help them use social media tools to get the best health information, connect with providers and each other, and inspire healthy choices. So their strategy is to leverage and enhance their reputation as a source of trusted information through their online presence and social media. And 41% of people said in this one poll said that social media would affect their choice of healthcare provider. And they really understand the power of patient engagement on social media. The interaction is important, but patients also desire in-depth great content. And this has been embraced and supported from leadership. And they are interested in the innovations in this arena. And they actually use social media presence in their academics promotions process. And I think it's no coincidence that, oh, sorry, this should say 2021. I updated it. It's still, it's been for many years, Mayo Clinic is number one. And then you have Memorial Sloan Kettering, where Cleveland Clinic is number three. We were number two last year. And they're also one of the, they're ranked number one hospital by US News and World Report. And one of the big components of the score is professional recognition, 31%. This is a Cleveland Clinic screenshot. And essentially this is an amorphous category that's based on expert opinion. And expert opinion can also be formed by impressions online. So let's take another global view of how much has social media penetrated US society and across the world. Well, in 2019, about 3 billion people were using social media. And that number is projected to increase to three and a half billion by 2023. As of January of 2020, about half of the population has tuned into this social network penetration. And then this is a daunting statistic, but US users spend about two hours per day on social media. So how about the statistics for the different social media platforms? I'm just gonna go over high level review here. Facebook has two and a half billion monthly users. It usually skews more Gen X and Boomer. Instagram is about 1 billion monthly users and skews more millennial. Twitter is actually smaller than both of those. It's about 330 million monthly users. Two thirds of the users are 35 to 65 and it's more cross-generational. The median age is 40 and two thirds are male. And you can see that quite a few people are using social media on a daily basis. I know my kids are accessing YouTube daily, but Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and then the biggie is still Facebook. So how is Facebook used by patients? It's a source of support and information for health conditions. In the endometriosis space, it's Nancy's Nook. And for us in FPRMS, the Association of Pelvic Organ Prolapse or APOPs. It's also been used as a mobilization tool for anti-Escher and anti-MeSH groups. So I just wanted to highlight this interesting article from Journal of Urology and it's from the Cedars-Sinai's group and Dr. Jennifer Enger, looked at women's experience with stress urinary incontinence, insights from social media analytics. And the emergent concepts were that it was basically a virtual support group. There was an anonymity of information seeking and sharing and it was a non-clinical population. And the major themes were unsatisfying patient-physician interactions, SUI prevention and risk factors, burden on quality of life, non-surgical versus surgical interventions. And the ones that were highlighted were Kegels, Yoni, vaginal eggs, Mona Lisa laser. And then they didn't even mention incontinence pessaries. Pre and post-op logistics, post-op complications, advice to seek multiple opinions prior to a non-native tissue repair, i.e. MeSH. And then the highly rated websites weren't even used or alluded to in a lot of the online chatter. So it is making an impact and patients are sharing their experiences online. I think many of you are probably in places with MIG surgeons or may even do endometriosis surgery yourself as advanced pelvic surgeons. One of the biggies is Nancy's Nook Endometriosis Facebook group. They also have a website and a Twitter presence and it's a significant source of MIG referrals. In my old practice in DC, it was about a third of the patients for my former partner, Jim Robinson's practice. They have a preferred provider list and they highly skewed towards preferring excision of endometriosis as opposed to medical therapy. This APOPS group, this is an old screenshot, but I think nowadays it's like 17,000 members. I've gotten referrals from this group as a provider in DC. And actually another one of my partners was also mentioned according to my patient. And she also asked me about these PRP injections into the vagina for her rectocele. So a lot of these ideas are bubbling up. And I think I have to say, I infiltrated this group as a mole and it's a lot of the stuff that was cited in that Journal of Urology article about perioperative logistics and complications and just fears about having prolapse, et cetera. I also wanted to highlight this Netflix documentary called The Bleeding Edge, because talking about mobilization, they really promote this narrative of profits over patients. And unfortunately, gynecologic devices were prominently featured. They featured a whole segment on eschewer, vaginal dehiscences associated with robotic hysterectomy, and transvaginal mesh. And one of the most interesting parts or stories in this documentary is how the anti-Eschewer activists mobilized via Facebook groups to lobby their U.S. representatives and the FDA to take action against Bayer. And as you know, Eschewer is no longer available. Just a quick scan of Eschewer problems, support groups. I mean, there's a lot of autoimmune symptoms, reversals, Eschewer problems, so there's a lot of posts per day. And this is a more active one. So this playbook has been repeated with the mesh groups. And the Ausayuga meeting in Nashville, the international folks from Australia and New Zealand allude to the mobilization of these anti-mesh groups on Facebook. And this is just an example. One of them is called Sling the Mesh. This one is actually based in the U.K. It's from Cambridgeshire. And they have a Twitter presence and a Facebook group as well as a website. So how do physicians use Facebook? Well, physicians use it as practice building to build their personal brand, create support, and then activism for political reasons or for a certain cause. And actually, a lot of people, almost two-thirds of people are using it daily and at least monthly it's also up to 60%. And I think it just depends on the age. I just wanted to give some examples of great marketing on social media. I think the Northwestern FMRS group does a great job. Emmy Breitscheider is missing here. This is an old screenshot. But anyway, they have a Facebook group. They have a Twitter presence. They actually have a Northwestern Medicine FMRS group now. And then I think Duke OB-GYN has a very nice department website and Twitter feed as well. In terms of personal brand building and support, I don't know if you guys are familiar with Sasha Shilcut, but she formed this group, this StyleMD group. They have a conference now. She founded this Brave Enough conference. She has her own website that has shopping picks. She has a podcast. She does coaching and master classes. She wrote this Between Grit and Grace book, which she actually came virtually for this Women's Professional Staff Association book club at the Cleveland Clinic. And she actually parlayed her social media presence to this New England Journal of Medicine article with Dr. Julie Silver. So on to Instagram. As many of you know, it's photo-based with captions. The hashtag used mirrors Twitter. It's owned by Facebook, as I alluded to earlier, is beloved by millennials, influencers, and shoppers. And their data collection is so robust, I like to say how dare they know me so well, because it results in targeted ads. It makes me want to buy Quip toothbrushes and Casper mattresses and LaFleur clothes. But in any case, it's a mechanism for social patient acquisition. So some examples of great Instagram presences in the OB-GYN world is Mama Dr. Jones. She is OB-GYN, and she really gears her social media presence on educating the public on health conditions. Dr. Stacey Tanui. She's a male alum. She is a boy mom, GYN, and she also does a lot of education on health conditions. Other examples of how to leverage Instagram presences, and this is, I think, old hat to many of you who are listening, because your fellows is using it to market your program. So this is the Cleveland OB-GYN tracking program. And this is a way to really highlight what it's like a day in the life of a Cleveland clinic resident. And this virtual.obgyn.match is another Instagram site where they'll have these InstaStory takeovers by different programs, and they'll just highlight what it's like at that program for that day. So I just wanted to go over this one paper that was published last year. Hashtag your guide was trending on Instagram and they looked at over half a million posts. The most common hashtags were on the public floor, interstitial cystitis, pelvic pain, intercontinence and prolapse. And the most common authors were patients followed by APPs. And then physicians were only 13%. APPs authored the most informational posts, which were about half of them and the accompanying editorial. There was a call to action by doctors, Carl, Jalad and Cherelle Glacier and they pointed out the example of urologists, oncologists and radiologists as early adopters. The urologists actually use the simpler portal to compile hashtags and tautology based on disease processes. And they used the hashtags to organize online forums and discussion on medical topics. So taking a closer look at these unified hashtags, it facilitates online search for specific topics. Think of it as your quote Dewey decimal system library coding system, but for online topics and enables development of more research collaborations and allows patients and healthcare professionals to discover more relative relevant content more easily. And I'm taking a page from this editorial. I actually am the chair of the SGS social media committee. And we worked on this joint statement and the gun claw gynecology, social media ontologies. And that was issued this year and a bunch of different societies signed on to it. It did not sign on because there was a, not enough obstetric terms on this, but essentially we compiled the, and this is a living document, but we, we compiled the different terms that people are using. And I think, especially in MIGS and REI arena with endometriosis and the fertility folks are really using these hashtags already and connecting online. But we just wanted to organize these ontologies so that people knew how to connect. If you can follow that hashtag. How about Twitter? Well, I always give the example. If you think it's superficial and unimportant, think of this. President Trump leveraged Twitter and Facebook through Cambridge Analytica to the U S presidency. It has a 280 character limits and I like to call it my productive time wasting habit. So just like I mentioned earlier about. Marketing programs and which is even more important in this era of virtual interviews and inability to get a sense of your program online. It's there's all these accounts that have arisen to bridge that gap. So this euro residency one is one for geared towards urology. Candidates who are going into urology and then programs can showcase. What they have going on. And then I already talked about this OBGYN virtual match. And then Liz Southworth is a resident and university of Michigan. And she made this list on Twitter for OBGYN residency programs, and you can subscribe to these lists. And it's a great way to connect online as well. Dr. Helen King Morgan is university of Michigan. And she. She actually was invited to Yukon. Because one of my friends, a lady to Alina to Nitsky Bitton at Hartford had seen my posts about resident wellness. And I was retweeting Helen's work and, and then they decided to bring Helen over to, to Yukon for grand rounds. So it's a great way to network. People can mobilize on causes. This. Hashtag her time is now is, was an initiative spearheaded by Dr. Julie Silver at Harvard. And there was a big report that was issued by the university of Michigan. And there was a big report that was issued last year about how many women are. Professors and chairs and deans of medical schools. And it's severely lacking, especially for women of color. So Dr. Kibili is the chair at university of Wash. And wash you. And. You know, she is talking about how she is one of the few medical school. Chairs who is a black woman. So, and she uses these hashtags in terms of her time is now, and let's get to work. I like to use my platform on Twitter to, to talk about many different things and I'll get into this later, but one of the things I feel, feel very strongly about is. The epitome of science in my mind is vaccine development and you just get a couple of shots and then you don't. You're not as prone to getting COVID or HPV. So actually my husband and I signed up for the Pfizer COVID vaccine trial at centers. And, and, you know, you, you do get engagement and, and then I think it helps to have people see your face. Like you're not growing two heads or something. I also like to humble brag on my platform. We were briefly number two in gynecology. So I, I took a picture with the fellows. I'm wearing my whites in Cleveland clinic. The surgeons wear whites, which is this is the only, probably the one and only time I'm going to be wearing the whites, but in any case we were ranked number two. And then I just tagged a bunch of people and, and it was, it's like a cool way to just let people know what's going on and humble brag about the accomplishments of the department on the personal front. Jennifer Gunther is probably the most famous Twitter gynecologist. I think probably many of you know, know her or know of her. She's actually leveraged her platform online to a New York times column. And this one is, is very relevant to us is incontinence and inevitable. And then she has a bestselling book called the vagina Bible. And then she has another one that just came out on menopause. So this is the, these examples, I think hopefully will inspire you to, to work on your, your, your social media platform because Jocelyn is was my former fellow. She just graduated last year. Actually she and I were at SGS one year and we didn't even break the top 10 influencers or top tweeters. And now she is, she's the master of social media. So she wrote this tweet in May 10th, I think a year, it must've been a year, a year and a half ago. And she talked about how she took an elective called stress in medical school. And she thought she was going to learn about meditation and yoga. And instead the professor spent six weeks proving, proving that being poor or a minority literally destroys your health. And on the molecular level, I think about that every day, she got almost half a million likes. And then this professor, that's so many people reaching out to him about what his course was about. He got a ton of more traction and, and views on his YouTube channel. And this really can bring a lot of attention and highlight important issues. Jocelyn also put together this hashtag Ginfluencer list. And I'm subscribed to this as well. And, and that's a great way to connect online. Many of you also know Ian, Ian Fields is at OHSU. Actually Jocelyn is now at Pitt at McGee women's hospital. Ian is at OHSU. He's the APD there. And he wrote this tweet about how his mother died of cervical cancer. She was a single mom who left behind two boys aged six and eight. Nothing could ever prepare you for that loss. I will die on a hill, wishing everyone would vaccinate against HPV. It would have saved my mother and would have changed my life. And he got 40,000 likes. And he parlayed that into a piece for self magazine, talking about how he's a HPV vaccine advocate. And I think it's, it really can make a huge difference sharing people's stories. And I think your voice is important. Lisa Hickman is my fellow who just graduated last year from the Cleveland Clinic. And she connected with this mother's fourth, fourth degree terrorist group. She founded the postpartum care clinic at the Cleveland Clinic. And when they connected, they had so many ideas of how to leverage their, their research and advocacy and to bring forward you know, these voices in, in, in many different ways. So I think there's a lot of good that can come about connecting with people online. And then fully Dr. Foley is a MIG surgeon at Brown, but at the time that she wrote these tweets, she was a second year MIG's fellow at McGee. And it was funny because Nancy Cheshire, I saw her tweet, who is Dr. Foley GYN, and then they were connecting online. She was the editor of the green journal just until last year. So it's a great way to connect with not only patients or advocacy groups, grand rounds opportunities, but also with the editor of the green journal. It's also a forum for advocacy. Dave Hackney was actually a, a fellow when I was a resident but he is very active in the ACOG chapter here in Ohio. And he's the division director at university hospitals. And he was talking about this HB413 in November, 2019 and how this, this bill was proposing that physicians must attempt to re-implant a ectopic pregnancy into the woman's uterus. And he just states that that's impossible and we'll all be going to jail. And he got over 2000 retweets and 3000 likes. I think it's also a very important forum online to talk about mental health issues. There, this was a famous case of an Australian plastic surgeon, trainee, they call them registrars in Australia. And she was basically harassed and, and abused. And she wrote this, this post. I think this was a blog post on how she was being worked in this, this trainee program. And then she has a book now says she's a recovering doctor, ex-plastic registrar. She published a memoir and, and then, you know, I think it mobilized people and got some press in the Australian newspapers about how female doctors are not one of these problems and actually exposed some significant misogyny. And then I think this definitely struck a chord talking about gender equity and diversity and, and, you know, and, and talking about the gender pay gap, et cetera. And then Dr. Conan also talks about this. This is crazy docs for socks. And this is actually a fundraising effort for mental health in Australia. And then, and then I think this is also a very important forum online to talk about gender equity. And this is actually a fundraising effort for mental health in Australia. So on to Tik TOK. This, this skews more towards teens and 20-somethings, although I wanted to point out and shout out to my favorite TikTok physician out there, who's Dr. Glaucum Flecken, and he is on point. I just wanted to point out this. This is just one of the many examples where he just nails it, but he's talking about Mother's Day and talking about when somebody says they did a fundus exam and the eyes, and then the fundus exam and the uterus, but he sort of nails each specialty in his own way, and he is an oracle of truth. Let me just say that. Dr. Cara King is one of my colleagues. She's a MIG surgeon. She actually did this TikTok fundraiser for the CDC Foundation at the beginning of the pandemic, and you can only see about half of his face, but Dr. Falcone was the former institute chair here and now is helping to get Cleveland Clinic London going. He wears many, many hats there, but anyway, this was a fun little fundraiser that she did. And really, my talk is Cara's talk version 4.0. She came to MedStar Washington Hospital Center where I was attending at the time and talked about setting up all these things like a LinkedIn profile and Twitter presence, and I was so skeptical, but I followed her advice and look at me now. So anyway, she also has a podcast that's called Gynecologic Surgeons Unscrupped, and I encourage everybody to listen to it. So I want to get down to the nitty gritty advice. When you set up your Twitter profile, you want to use a professional headshot, use Dr. or MD as part of your handle and with your name, put a short bio so people know who you are. I actually saw some other more recent advice that talked about putting more hashtags on here so that people know what you're about and then putting more of a photo over here. So learn from my, do as I say, not as I'm doing. But you also want to link to your website bio. I've linked to my Cleveland Clinic staff bio here. Put a disclaimer that the opinions and tweets are your own. Make sure that you know your institution's social media policy, and this is subject to change. The Cleveland Clinic just clamped down on social media stuff, so I highly encourage you to take a look at it. You can get in legal hot water with all of this stuff. And then keep your post positive and professional because if you are linking, people can easily look you up and see who you are and where you work, and I'd be very careful about what you post and about whom. That being said, if you put yourself out there, I just want to warn people, hate is gonna hate. I did tweet out a link to this Associated Press article that Dr. Jeff Clemens was quoted in talking about the safe track record of smishlings to treat stress urinary incontinence. And I got trolled, and eventually I had to block them, this person, these people. And they got real personal. Sorry it's so blurry, but they went after some board members of AUGS and it was kind of ugly. My take is people aren't gonna agree with you all the time, just like patients don't agree with me all the time in terms of my medical care. And I think you kind of just have to have a thick skin about it. And I know what I'm saying is evidence-based, so I don't have any regrets about posting this article. But sometimes there's some serious online feelings that come out. So what are my thoughts about Twitter? And I would say Twitter, people have different strengths. I think the one that I'm most active on is Twitter. And I use Facebook and Instagram more on a personal level, and then Twitter on a more professional level. And I think that generally speaking, you wanna create your own personal brand and narrative. You can decide for yourself if you wanna have a narrow or broad focus. My personal interests are to promote science, evidence-based medicine, just like I said, vaccines, best practices and leadership, work-life balance, women in medicine. You wanna stick to reputable sources. Reputation building, I alluded to this earlier. You wanna embrace the humble brag, thought leadership. Use and leverage the platform to elevate interesting and innovative people, concepts of work, and retweet others. Be aware of the echo chamber and then block the trolls. I really enjoy this woman, Sarah Mojarad. She tweets a lot of really interesting insights about academic Twitter and just social media in general. And I like this blog post that she had about creating personal roles and focus. So you wanna follow high value accounts, retweet high quality posts, add value and create conversations, congratulate others for achievements, use Twitter to network, reach out to more experienced Twitter users in real life, share your ideas, use hashtags, avoid sarcasm, and don't plagiarize tweets. Marie Truong also likes to give the advice, don't put too many hashtags because more than three hashtags, she says it makes it sound spammy. There's not a big limit. There's a character limit anyway, so it's hard to put in too many hashtags in my opinion. And just to humble brag myself, Sarah Mojarad called me out as a good tweeter. So I was happy about that, but she talked about how I advocate for physician wellness and COVID vaccine safety. And I shared the research updates and amplifies people within the field. And she thought it was an excellent case study on how to effectively build a professional brand on social media. Because I talked about my friends' daughters who are participating in the Moderna COVID vaccine teen trial. So more thoughts on personal brand and narrative. Nature abhors a vacuum. So if you don't write your own story, someone else will write it for you. Own the first page of your Google search content. I like to do online hygiene checks every four to six weeks just to see what's out there. Be your best self. And like my brother likes to say, he works at Google, his opinion is that if it's not online, it doesn't exist. So in terms of website bio, this is a time again to humble brag. Don't be shy. I put a lot of things in here. I don't even know what this is. It's Cass O'Connelly, exceptional women in medicine. I just got this top docs in Cleveland. I'm definitely putting it on here. All of these committees that you're on, you should put that on there too. All of that work that you're doing on conference calls every month, just put it on your professional highlights page. Use LinkedIn also because it allows you to write your own narrative and it usually is highly, it's usually on the first page of your Google search based on the algorithm. And just remember this, I like this little schematic of instead of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it's Maslow's hierarchy of search engine optimization needs. But in terms of online content, you wanna think about crawl accessibility. This is more a technical thing, but this we have control over. Compelling content that answers the searcher's query, it's keyword optimized, great user experience, including fast load speed, ease of use, compelling user interface on any device, so I mean a computer or a phone. Share worthy content that earns links, citations and applications, and then title, URL and description. And then it's essential here to Ranky's and then this, as you go up here, it improves competitiveness. So I just wanted to give the example of my friend, Matt Reeves, he's family planning in Washington, DC. He has his own family planning clinic called the DuPont Clinic. And he has a graphic designer, he spends a lot of money on Google searches. He has a nice little bio about himself, a nice headshot, is professional. So all essential when you build your online presence. Other content, patient-oriented videos, Facebook Live chats, readings websites, like your hospital system, WebMD, Google and Healthgrades. And I just wanna point out, this is very important, and I had a little session with our contact center, which is like basically the telephone operators who make all the appointments for Women's Health Institute. And essentially they also talked about how patient ratings really drive appointments. So the bottom line is we live in a Yelp world and it's the number of stars versus number of reviews. So if it's 23 reviews versus a thousand reviews, it makes a big difference. So Yelp, Amazon, all that stuff, we're so attuned to it, Rotten Tomatoes. So I needed to get a new hairdresser to do my hair once I moved from DC to Cleveland. And I looked on Yelp, and then I lived on the East side of Cleveland, so over in this area. And then I looked and there's one that's called Sean Paul Salon. And then I cross-referenced on Instagram, and then I found somebody that I liked on Instagram. And lo and behold, like three other people, like two of the fellows and one other attending decided to go the same woman because we did all the same process. And the patients are doing that to us too. And actually when I was in DC, patients would say stuff to me like, I did research on you and I can tell you're the best doctor. And they just looked at me and all my partners and they saw that I had 4.7 stars, but I had 830 patient readings. And that's what they were basing their opinion on. And basically you should Google yourself to see what pops up. I have all these different little reviews here. And this is actually a content aggregator by Google, this box on the right. And it will show how many stars you get from the different websites here. But I want to hone in on this one, this review. I had a horrible experience with this doctor. She said, she is condescending, rude, disrespectful and pompous. Her bedside manner is horrendous. Moreover, I have more pain now than prior to being under Dr. Park's care. I wouldn't let or recommend Dr. Park to my worst enemy. I am seeing another doctor to correct Dr. Park's mistake. She was way out of her league for my particular surgery and was arrogant to say so. So right after she actually composed this, she put my name into Google so she would create a site for me so that she could put in the zero stars for me. And then as soon as she did this, I noticed my volume dropped quite a bit. And I went into like a little bit of a funk or depression. But then after I did some online research and I gathered my thoughts, I was like, no, no, I'm not gonna take this. So what I decided to do is bury the review. So I solicited grateful patients to submit reviews. And I explained, I have a disgruntled patient. I'd love it if you could just put some review online because I think it was a misunderstanding. I can't get into this, but it would be wonderful if you could just put a review on for me. And my patients were happy to do it. They can do it on the institution's patient review system, online patient ratings like WebMD, healthgrades.doc and vitals.com, Yelp and the Google location. So just some parting thoughts, reputation management. The internet may be useful for you, but it's not working for you. You have to be proactive because prospective employers and patients will be doing searches on you. And significant online damage can be inflicted due to personal and professional grudges. You can't erase what's online. It lives on the internet forever. But the good news is if it's off page one of Google, it basically doesn't exist. So you have to bury it and create your own story and dominate your profile. Consider setting up a Google alert on yourself in terms of monitoring negative reviews, hate sites, negative media, maximize your Facebook privacy settings and don't post a lot of photos about your family on social media. So flood the zone with evidence-based information, create your own crafted personal narrative, tout your accomplishments, be positive, elevate and do not denigrate and do online hygiene checks and follow your Google page search. Thank you and I welcome your questions. Thank you very much, Dr. Park. What a timely talk in the age that we're currently living in with COVID and everything else going on. We do have 15 minutes for questions and you can submit your questions in the Q&A section. And the first question that we have, Dr. Park, is you talked a lot about at the beginning of your talk about sites and blogs that are brought and created by patients themselves in order to encourage other patients. And do you have any tips on how to manage it when patients come in after reading those blogs, those sites, those Facebook pages that aren't created by the docs themselves and they're not based in evidence-based medicine? Do you specifically refer them to follow people or the APOPS website that might be more evidence-based or just kind of use your expertise to counsel them appropriately? I haven't had that scenario play out in my practice as much because I think that the younger patients for endometriosis patients and Nancy's up gets way more prevalent. Fortunately, I think because our patient population skews older, it's not as, I don't think they're as distrustful or as negative maybe. I would say we have a lot of pamphlets, the ACOG pamphlets and iUGA pamphlets. So I usually refer people to either the Voyager website or the Voices for PFD website or ACOG or iUGA just to get some more information. And I think the main arena where there's a lot of misinformation in Urugine is about the mesh. And first of all, I don't, my personal philosophy is not to promote mesh if that's not what they want because obviously we have native tissue repairs. And I think that, I just try and lay out the options. And the good news is we're, this is elective surgery. So it's not as if they have to have the surgery or not. And you can always offer a second opinion if it's not the right fit, I guess, in terms of the relationship. Yeah. Another question is, I think it's, you hear it in the consumer marketplace a lot of a happy customer maybe tells one friend that they're happy and a unhappy customer tells a thousand. And you touched on this about asking your happy patients to write reviews to kind of counter those negative reviews. But is there a way if somebody writes something extremely negative about you or really just untrue to kind of, I know you said maybe not get it erased but maybe even prevent that from happening in the first place? You know, I've, I had it happen a couple of times and I think you can reach out to the website and see if they'll redact it. And I think on certain websites, they give you like one or two passes where they will post it. Again, I think the main way that I looked up is like, you just have to get other people to bury it by putting positive things on there. And actually there was an article in the Green Journal on the legal aspects of like online slander. And it cited research that if you have a negative review it actually bolsters your credibility of the positive reviews. So I think that the key is to increase the N and the number of reviews so that people will see that there's not just one. Because I mean, it doesn't even matter. Now we're so near true, but if you look on Amazon or Yelp nobody has like five stars. There's always something negative, but you can discount it if you see it's mostly positive. So I think that's the main advice or takeaway. Well, if there's no further questions on behalf of AUGS I would like to thank you, Dr. Park and everyone for joining us today. Our next fellows webinar will be held on October 26th at 8 p.m. Eastern time. And you can visit the AUGS website to sign up. Thank you.

internet

social media

physician

patients

health misinformation

trust in doctors

evidence-based medicine

gynecology

online presence