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)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Association of Social Media Presence with Online Physician Ratings and Surgical Volume Among California Urologists: Observational Study
Background:
Urologists are increasingly using various forms of social media to promote their professional practice and attract patients. Currently, the association of social media on a urologists’ practice is unknown.
Objectives:
We aimed to determine whether social media presence is associated with higher online physician ratings and surgical volume among California urologists.
Methods:
We sampled 195 California urologists who were rated on the ProPublica Surgeon Scorecard website. We obtained information on professional use of online social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, blog, and YouTube) in 2014 and defined social media presence as a binary variable (yes/no) for use of an individual platform or any platform. We collected data on online physician ratings across websites (Yelp, Healthgrades, Vitals, RateMD, and UCompareHealthcare) and calculated the mean physician ratings across all websites as an average weighted by the number of reviews. We then collected data on surgical volume for radical prostatectomy from the ProPublica Surgeon Scorecard website. We used multivariable linear regression to determine the association of social media presence with 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 a slightly higher mean physician rating (β coefficient: .3; 95% CI 0.03-0.5; P=.05). However, only YouTube was associated with higher physician ratings (β coefficient: .3; 95% CI 0.2-0.5; P=.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=.04). Social media presence on any platform was associated with increased radical prostatectomy volume (β coefficient: 7.1; 95% CI –0.7 to 14.2; P=.05).
Conclusions:
Urologists’ use of social media, especially YouTube, is associated with a modest increase in physician ratings and prostatectomy volume. Although a majority of urologists are not currently active on social media, patients may be more inclined to endorse and choose subspecialist 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.