Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Feb 23, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Feb 23, 2018 - Aug 3, 2018
Date Accepted: Apr 2, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
The Impact of Social Media Presence on Online Physician Ratings and Surgical Volume among California Urologists
ABSTRACT
Background:
Urologists are increasingly using social media to promote their professional practice but impact of this activity is unknown.
Objective:
We sought to determine whether professional use of social media is associated with higher online physician ratings and surgical volume.
Methods:
We sampled 195 California urologists rated on the ProPublica Surgeon Scorecard website. We obtained information on professional use of online social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Blog, YouTube) in 2014 and defined social media presence as a binary variable (yes/no) for use of an individual platform or for use of any platform. We collected data on online physician ratings across websites (Yelp, Healthgrades, Vitals, RateMD, UCompareHealthcare) and calculated the mean physician rating score across all websites as an average weighted by number of reviews. We then gathered data on surgical volume for radical prostatectomy from ProPublica. We used multivariable linear regression to determine the impact of social media presence on physician ratings and surgical volume.
Results:
Among our sample of 195 urologists, 62 (32%) were active on some form of social media. Social media presence on any platform was associated with slightly higher mean physician rating score (β coefficient 0.3, 95% CI 0.03-0.5, p=0.5). However, only YouTube was associated with higher physician rating score (β coefficient 0.3, 95% CI 0.2-0.5, p=0.04). Social media presence on YouTube was strongly associated with increased radical prostatectomy volume (β coefficient 7.4, 95% CI 0.3-14.5, p=0.04). Social media presence on any platform was associated with increased radical prostatectomy volume (β coefficient 7.1, 95% CI -0.7-14.2, p=0.05).
Conclusions:
Urologists’ use of social media, especially YouTube, is associated with a modest increase in physician ratings and prostatectomy volume. Although the majority of urologists are not currently active on social media, patients may be more inclined to endorse and choose sub-specialist urologists who post videos of their surgical technique.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.