Online medical journaling raises privacy issues

For physicians of a certain age, the weekly teaching session known as grand rounds is a ritual steeped in formality and tradition. Presided over by the profession's graybeards, grand rounds are attended with white coats on and clinical details in hand. Young physicians learn to accept their elders' old-school admonishments with reverence and humility.

Grand rounds on the Internet is another thing altogether. A weekly compilation of the Internet's best medical blog postings, it is part classroom, part locker room, part group therapy session and part office party -- a freewheeling collection of rants, shop talk, case studies and learned commentary (along with the occasional recipe, movie review or vacation slide show).

This rotating roundup, hosted each week by a different blogger, is the center ring of a colorful and growing circus of blogs written by medical professionals and posted for all to see. It is making the practice of medicine more transparent to patients and raising questions about safeguarding patient privacy.

"Medical blogs have the opportunity to be such a benefit to patients," says Dr. Tara Lagu, author of an article on the subject published online last week in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. "By revealing the struggles we have, they can really open patients' eyes to how to interact with doctors, they can connect patients and nurses who can be isolated from each other and they can be an important source of information for doctors as well as patients."

But as physicians increasingly use blogs to talk shop and vent their frustrations online, patient privacy has become an issue, says Lagu, who is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar and an internal medicine specialist. "It's time for us to take some responsibility and really think of how we can maintain the integrity of this process."

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, gives patients strong privacy protections, but the 1996 law predates the medblog phenomenon, leaving gray areas for bloggers who write about their patients.

In a 2006 study, Lagu and her co-authors found 271 blogs written by physicians or nurses. Roughly 42 percent of those blogs included descriptions of interactions with individual patients, and almost 17 percent "included sufficient information for patients to identify their doctors or themselves." Three of the blogs showed recognizable photographic images of patients.

And in a sign that blogs may increasingly become a means of indirect marketing by pharmaceutical and device makers, 11.4 percent had postings promoting health care products. Few, however, said anything about an author's conflict of interest.

Medical blogs are the place to eavesdrop on what doctors and nurses are talking about in break rooms and at conferences and to read what medical professionals think about the latest clinical studies or health care proposals making headlines. For a growing number of the nation's more than 700,000 physicians and 2.9 million nurses, they are a gathering place like no other.

Here, members of the community jettison the facade of clinical authority; abandon forbearance with obstinate or demanding patients; and flout the convention of paying homage to the profession's most senior practitioners.

"Like everything else on the Internet, it's just kind of the Wild West," says Dr. Allen Roberts, an emergency room doctor from Fort Worth, Texas, who is better known in the blogosphere as the author of the GruntDoc blog (gruntdoc.com). "It's very leveling. ... You can write in print what you would never say to a surgeon's face about him being an overweening jerk."