Division of General Medicine and Primary Care, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
J Gen Intern Med. 2010 Nov;25(11):1152-6. doi: 10.1007/s11606-010-1425-7. Epub 2010 Jun 11.
Although patients are commonly using the Internet to find healthcare information, the amount of personal and professional physician information and patient-generated ratings freely accessible online is unknown.
To characterize the nature of online professional and personal information available to the average patient searching for physician information through a standardized web search.
DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: We studied 250 randomly selected internal medicine physicians registered with the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine in 2008. For each physician, standardized searches via the Google search engine were performed using a sequential search strategy. The top 20 search results were analyzed, and websites that referred to the study subject were recorded and categorized. Physician rating sites were further investigated to determine the number of patient-entered reviews.
Number and content of websites attributable to specific physicians.
Websites containing personal or professional information were identified for 93.6% of physicians. Among those with any web sites identified, 92.8% had professional information and 32.4% had personal information available online. Female physicians were more likely to have professional information available on the Internet than male physicians (97.5% vs. 91.7%, p=0.03), but had similar rates of available personal information (32.5% vs. 32.5%, p=ns). Among personal sites, the most common categories included social networking sites such as Facebook (10.8% of physicians), hobbies (10.0%), charitable or political donations (9.6%), and family information (8.8%). Physician rating sites were identified for 86.4% of providers, but only three physicians had more than five reviews on any given rating site.
Personal and professional physician information is widely available on the Internet, and often not under direct control of the individual physician. The availability of such information has implications for physician-patient relationships and suggests that physicians should monitor their online information.
尽管患者通常会使用互联网查找医疗保健信息，但患者可以在线免费获取的个人和专业医生信息以及患者生成的评分数量尚不清楚。
通过标准化网络搜索，描述普通患者在搜索医生信息时可获取的在线专业和个人信息的性质。
设计、地点和参与者：我们对 2008 年马萨诸塞州注册医师委员会注册的 250 名随机选择的内科医生进行了研究。对于每位医生，我们使用顺序搜索策略通过 Google 搜索引擎进行了标准化搜索。分析了前 20 个搜索结果，并记录和分类了指向研究对象的网站。进一步调查了医生评分网站，以确定患者输入的评论数量。
归因于特定医生的网站数量和内容。
确定了 93.6%的医生的个人或专业信息网站。在那些有任何网站的医生中，92.8%有专业信息，32.4%有个人信息可在线获取。女性医生比男性医生更有可能在互联网上提供专业信息（97.5%比 91.7%，p=0.03），但提供的个人信息比例相似（32.5%比 32.5%，p=ns）。在个人网站中，最常见的类别包括 Facebook（10.8%的医生）、爱好（10.0%）、慈善或政治捐款（9.6%）和家庭信息（8.8%）等社交网站。识别出了 86.4%的医生的医生评分网站，但只有三名医生在任何给定的评分网站上有超过五个评分。
个人和专业医生信息在互联网上广泛可用，而且通常不受医生个人的直接控制。这种信息的可用性对医患关系有影响，并表明医生应该监测他们的在线信息。
