Doctors and Medical Information on the Internet

People might think that doctors only use medical textbooks to obtain knowledge regarding their field. They would be wrong. They 2011 health survey conducted by Walters Kluwer showed that forty six percent of physicians stated that they do use Google and Yahoo as a frequent source of medical information. Another thirty two percent confessed that they use it as an occasional resource to obtain health information to utilize for patient care.
Over sixty percent of physicians stated that after using an Internet source regarding health information, they had changed an initial diagnosis on one of their patients. Approximately 90% of doctors Dieting Food in the survey felt that better access to online health information and associated online resources has elevated the quality of care that they’re providing. Only 12% felt the opposite.
With regards to the doctor patient relationship, almost 80% of doctors say that lack of time is one of the most common barriers to maintaining good communication with their patients. In this day and age of decreasing insurance reimbursement, it is becoming all too common for doctors to need Valley Medical Center Billing to see more and more patients to be able to cover their overhead. Doctors often need to double book patients a lot of the time to reduce the incidence of no-shows and to increase their collections since a lot of them are making double-digit percentages less than they were 10 years ago.
Just over half of doctors (53%) feel that one of the challenges to a great communication relationship with their patients is misinformation. One of the reasons for this is that over two thirds of individuals obtain health information online. This information is commonly written up in blogs and areas non-referenced or peer reviewed which in the current era provides a lot of misinformation to patients.
Unfortunately what then happens is that doctors need to correct misinformation and then give the appropriate information which they were going to give and then this adds up to a lot of wasted time which only feeds into the situation that doctors are faced with to begin with.
This leads to the other problem that doctors have with the doctor-patient relationship which is information overload. With there being so much information on the Internet now with regards to everything including health, it can be very confusing and disappointing to have to sort through all of this while sitting with the patient. Prior to the Internet coming into existence, patients were not able to acquire such a broad array of medical information.