Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago, IL.
Aesthet Surg J. 2019 Mar 14;39(4):447-451. doi: 10.1093/asj/sjy285.
Patients increasingly rely on online resources to make healthcare decisions. Google dominates the search engine market; first-page results receive most of the web traffic and therefore serve as an important indicator of consumer reach.
Our objective was to analyze the respective importance of physician academic pedigree, experience, and social media presence on plastic surgeon Google first-page search result placement.
A Google.com search was conducted in the top 25 United States metropolitan areas to identify the top 20 websites of board-certified plastic surgeons. Social media presence was quantified by tracking the number of followers on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for every surgeon as well as medical school and year of graduation. The primary outcome was website ranking in the first page of Google search results. To identify the independent predictors of presence on the front page, we performed a multivariate logistic regression.
Total number of social medial followers was associated with Google front-page placement (P < 0.001), whereas medical school ranking and years in practice were not (P = 0.17 and 0.39, respectively). A total 19.6% of plastic surgeon practices in our study cohort still had no social media accounts whatsoever.
For the past few decades, plastic surgery practices relied on referrals, word of mouth, and the surgeon's reputation and academic pedigree to attract new patients. It is now clear that this practice-building model is being rapidly supplanted by a new paradigm based on social media presence to reach potential patients.
患者越来越依赖在线资源来做出医疗保健决策。谷歌占据了搜索引擎市场的主导地位；第一页的搜索结果获得了大部分的网络流量，因此成为了消费者触达的重要指标。
我们的目的是分析医生的学术背景、经验和社交媒体存在对整形外科医生谷歌搜索第一页结果排名的相对重要性。
在全美 25 个最大城市进行了谷歌搜索，以确定 20 家排名最高的认证整形外科医生网站。通过跟踪每位外科医生、医学院和毕业年份在 Facebook、Twitter 和 Instagram 上的关注者数量，量化社交媒体的存在。主要结果是网站在谷歌搜索结果第一页的排名。为了确定出现在首页的独立预测因素，我们进行了多元逻辑回归分析。
社交媒体关注者总数与谷歌首页排名相关（P < 0.001），而医学院排名和从业年限则没有相关性（分别为 P = 0.17 和 0.39）。在我们的研究队列中，仍有 19.6%的整形外科医生没有任何社交媒体账户。
在过去几十年中，整形外科医生的实践依赖于转介、口碑以及外科医生的声誉和学术背景来吸引新患者。现在很明显，这种实践建设模式正在被一种基于社交媒体存在的新模式所取代，以接触到潜在的患者。
