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Amanda Heidemann, family physician and senior clinical content consultant for clinical effectiveness at Wolters Kluwer Health, discusses her article, “Gen Z’s DIY approach to health care.” Amanda explains how digital natives are turning to TikTok, friends, and online research as their primary sources of health information, often disregarding professional guidance in favor of accessible advice. She highlights the rise of telehealth, retail clinics, and urgent care as central parts of Gen Z’s health ecosystem, and the need for providers to adapt to this consumer-driven shift. Amanda also emphasizes the importance of collaboration, encouraging health care professionals to meet patients where they are, embrace AI-powered resources, and build trust through education and partnership. Listeners will gain insights into how health care professionals can reframe their role in this new era of patient engagement.

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi. Welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today we welcome Amanda Heidemann. She’s a physician executive, and today’s KevinMD article is “Gen Z’s DIY approach to health care.” Amanda, welcome to the show.

Amanda Heidemann: Hi, it’s great to be here.

Kevin Pho: Let’s start by briefly sharing your story, and then we’ll jump right into the KevinMD article that you shared with us today.

Amanda Heidemann: Great. I’m a family physician by original training, but I’ve been working in health tech for most of my career. As I came out of residency, I went to work for a large health system here in St. Louis that was looking at piloting the first paperless office for them way back in the day. I think we’ve all seen what electronic health records have done as far as impacting practice over the last twenty-five years or so.

Many things have been good with EHRs; many things have been challenging with EHRs. As I worked my way through my career, I moved from being on the health system side to working for an electronic health record vendor, working with customers, and trying to get through those pain points. I’ve also spent some time in the telehealth world, working with both freestanding telehealth companies and helping large health systems do telehealth as well. Ultimately, I currently work at Wolters Kluwer, working on clinical decision support and AI solutions with them.

Kevin Pho: Your KevinMD article talks about “Gen Z’s DIY approach to health care.” I’m interested in hearing your perspectives on that, but for those who didn’t get a chance to read your article, just tell us what it’s about.

Amanda Heidemann: I wanted to talk a little bit about just how generations work within the health care environment differently. I think a lot of us, depending on where we trained, and I’ll self-identify, I am a proud Gen Xer. We work with a lot of patients that are older, that are in the baby boomer generation or the silent generation, and they have a particular approach to health care. I have two children, they’re twenty and twenty-five, and as I looked at how they approach the world in general, and especially how they approach health care, I realized that it was different from what I see a lot of organizations and practices offering.

I think we as health care delivery organizations have to think about what we need to do differently to meet those patients where they are for them to be able to get the best outcomes. If we try and apply what’s appropriate for or what a baby boomer wants for their health care experience to the average 20- to 25-year-old, that’s not going to work so well. That’s what I wanted to look into when I started writing the piece.

Kevin Pho: I completely agree with you. I’ve been in the social media space for decades now, and we do need to meet people where they are because gone are the days where they’re traditionally looking for health care information. As you’re going to talk about, I’m sure they’re finding information in all these new mediums that seem to be coming out every day. So tell us specifically, with Gen Z, where are they finding health information today?

Amanda Heidemann: The answer is everywhere. Whereas in the past, I think more people would’ve gotten information from friends and family, and I still think they do that to some degree, but they’re also getting a lot of it from social media. TikTok is a big thing, especially with influencers and different product placements. I’ll tell you a funny story about that. I was working for an urgent care organization and one year in January, we had this whole run of people with all kinds of skin rashes, particularly teenage girls. It turns out that there was a big brand that was promoted heavily for the holiday season that had ingredients that were not appropriate for teenage girls, and so they were using these anti-aging facial products that were causing rashes.

That clued me in to the power of social media and influencers. We see a lot of TikTok. We see a lot of people just using ChatGPT and asking it medical questions. They may go sometimes to hospital or health system websites or sites from their doctor’s office, but we see a lot of folks branching out and looking for information wherever they can find it. There was one great article that looked specifically at TikTok for medical information, and the number one reason that users cited for why they were going to TikTok was because it was free. For me, as a family practice physician, the challenge is how do we introduce this group to other resources that are also free but may have more scientifically backed information or things that are a little less influencer-driven?

Kevin Pho: What do you do in the exam room if a patient or a patient’s family comes to you and says, “I saw this on TikTok”? Give us your approach in terms of answering some of the questions that they have, perhaps rebutting some of the information that they’re consuming, and maybe redirecting them to a more reputable source of information.

Amanda Heidemann: I think the first thing is to understand why they went there for the information in the first place. That helps me get a little bit of context around whether they have had previous negative interactions with the health care system or with other health care personalities. That’s why they’re going out to the internet or going to TikTok, because I need to understand that background, especially if the information is concerning or something that’s not necessarily what I want to recommend. I need to understand that background so that we can have a conversation around it.

Sometimes I’ll actually pull up whatever video they saw. They’ll say, “I saw this on TikTok,” and I’m like, “Well, let’s pull it up and let’s look at it together.” Let’s talk about what about this is appealing to you. Is it because this particular person recommended it, or is it something that fits with your cultural beliefs and practices? Or had you heard a friend did it also? Sometimes we get lucky and there are a lot of good sources out there from health care organizations that are just using TikTok as a medium. Those are the nice aha moments when I ask them to pull it up and it’s something like, “Oh yeah, this is one hundred percent correct and we can get on board with this.”

Sometimes it’s a different conversation, but I try to dissect why they find this treatment appealing. Is it appropriate for the condition? What are the other options? Fortunately, there’s still a lot of trust, I think, between patients, especially with family physicians and people that they have longer-term relationships with, to be able to talk about those different scenarios and ultimately what’s best for the patient.

Kevin Pho: Are there any red flags that you caution patients about when they’re consuming information online? It doesn’t necessarily have to be from influencers, because I know that there are a lot of legitimate physicians on TikTok and other social media platforms that sometimes also promote suspect information. To your patients, what kind of red flags should they be looking for when they’re evaluating information online?

Amanda Heidemann: In health care, there are a lot of things that are the same as just the rest of the world and consuming media information in general. I encourage patients to think about, if you watch this, does it seem too good to be true? Because often, whether it’s health care or finance or banking, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. I encourage them to take those initial steps with it, but also to look at what the person’s background is. Do they have any particular degree or training? What’s their level of experience? Do they have associations with other professional organizations? I think those are really helpful.

Especially if information seems compelling, I encourage people to look for other sources that either corroborate that information or conflict with that information. For my patients specifically, I try to make sure that there’s a variety of resources available to them that they can use for that vetting process. If you saw this on TikTok and it’s also what is in my competitive information, then they know that that’s a positive sign. I always encourage them if they see something that they think is suspect, to give me a call, send me a message on it, and let’s talk about it.

Kevin Pho: Of course, we have to mention the political climate of medical authorities right now. I used to redirect patients to places like the CDC.gov websites, but now with the politicization of health care information, sometimes that information is not scientifically backed. In this current political climate, how are you advising patients to evaluate information from sources that were once seen as authoritative?

Amanda Heidemann: Because of the shifts that have been going on, normally I would’ve referred people to the CDC website; that was always very reputable. Now, I think I’m tending more to refer people to websites that are affiliated with professional organizations. As a family physician, I send people to familydoctor.org because that has become a new, trusted organization. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists for obstetrics and gynecology. I really think the professional organizations have stepped up in this environment as far as making more information and credible information accessible to patients.

I encourage patients to think about, “Hey, this is an organization that is committed to doing the right thing for patients long-term. It’s not a political organization. It’s not turning over periodically, and it can be trusted.” There are a lot of other good sources out there. Immunize.org is one of my favorite resources that’s not politically or governmentally affiliated. I think it’s just having that conversation about what resources I use as a physician when I need to go looking for something, and I think patients really appreciate that.

Kevin Pho: I want to follow up on what you said about AI and ChatGPT. I think a lot of patients are now using those sources and coming into my exam room. Sometimes the information that they’re getting from ChatGPT is legitimate and accurate, but sometimes it’s not. Tell us what you’re seeing in terms of that intersection between what patients are finding on these AI tools and what you’re experiencing in the exam room.

Amanda Heidemann: That can actually be really challenging because I think some of the newer AI platforms are so good. They are very convincing, and even when they’re giving you medical misinformation, they’re very convincing. It can even be challenging for clinicians with training and background to be able to identify when things are a little bit off. I always encourage folks to look at what some of the sources are behind it, if they can see that with the particular tools, and then to also just understand where the tools are coming from.

Is it just a commercially available model? Is it something that is medically specific? I think we’re starting to see more health care delivery organizations offer their own chatbots and their own AI solutions that may be drawing from more vetted information that patients can trust. I think it’s very difficult, and it has to be an ongoing conversation with clinicians and their patients about how to critically appraise these resources, because some of them will tell you things that are flat-out wrong, and it’s just so very difficult to sort that out.

Kevin Pho: We’re both primary care physicians. You’re a family physician; I’m an internal medicine physician. Talk about the importance of the long-term relationship, because I really think that cannot be understated. Can you share a story, maybe of a patient who came to you with something that was medically suspect or believed something they saw online, and because of the relationship that you had with them, you were able to steer them or convince them of better-vetted scientific information?

Amanda Heidemann: That’s a great topic because especially when you look at Gen Z, which is what the article was about, there’s been such a shift in health care as far as patients, especially in younger generations, prioritizing convenience over that long-term relationship. I mentioned working in the urgent care environment. The particular setting that I worked in, we had actually almost become the primary care office due to the shortage of primary care. Even though we were an urgent care, we were developing these long-term relationships with patients and being able to look at interactions that we’ve had with them in our particular facility, or through electronic health records, we can see what’s been going on over time.

I think once people get to their first serious health issue, that’s when they start better appreciating the value of that continuity and the value of having someone who knows you and understands you, not just your medical history, but who you are as a person. Sometimes we have those interactions in some of the most difficult situations, where a patient is considering between a couple of different things that they should do. One of my favorite stories is a patient who came into urgent care for a completely unrelated problem who had been to two different specialists and wanted my opinion because they trusted me, even though I really wasn’t in a primary care role at the time. I think there’s more of that that we will see as people start to age and as they start to understand the value of having that continuity.

I know for me as a physician, I think it’s just so rewarding when you’re able to see people over time and just see how their lives have evolved. You start to see the children of people that you took care of when they were young adults. It really is magical, and I hope that medical students can have those kinds of experiences and get drawn back to primary care because it really is a great way to pursue medicine.

Kevin Pho: Both you and I are in that AI and social media space as physicians, but not a lot of physicians are. What do you say to those physicians who may not be familiar with the latest in AI technology or social media and just aren’t familiar with the information that patients are consuming online? Where can they learn more about some of these newer tools that they may not be accustomed to?

Amanda Heidemann: Some of the professional organizations have been great about providing education around some of the different solutions. My own specialty, we have a journal called *Family Practice Management*, and they’ve had a couple of articles that are positioned towards physicians that may not know as much about some of these technologies, just kind of breaking them down and talking them through it. I like to read a bunch of different media sources just to look at how patients are consuming information and how physicians are consuming information. Sources like the Kaiser Family Foundation have had some great articles that I think are very balanced as far as looking at how people are using this information. I think it’s just encouraging our physician peers to put themselves in their patient’s shoes and learn about it in the same way that their patient would.

More to the physician side, I encourage folks, and I’ve seen a couple of large delivery organizations that have put on continuing ed courses for their providers about how to critically appraise these new sources. “What is AI? What is retrieval-augmented generation? What is a model? What is an LLM?” I think we’ll see more of that up and coming as far as organizations trying to educate their physicians and other provider groups so that they can be better stewards of the information. Of course, helping them identify vendors that can be trusted as far as providing that information and people that have reputable and responsible AI tools that they’re putting out there. I think that’s going to be key.

Kevin Pho: What do you see as the current trends in the next six to twelve months when it comes to consuming medical information? What do we have to look forward to?

Amanda Heidemann: We will see a lot of people continuing to use commercial solutions, things that are not purpose-built for health care, but I think that’s starting to swing around, especially as care delivery organizations become a little bit more rigorous about identifying tools that they want or do not want their physicians to be using. We’re seeing a lot of organizations stand up pretty robust AI governance where they’re reviewing different solutions and even blocking some that they don’t feel are in the best interest of their patients or their providers.

I think we’ll see a fair amount of that transition over the next six months as organizations figure out what is the best solution, what do they want their providers to use, and what can they use to ensure ongoing quality in their care delivery. There was a lot of disruption at the beginning. I think we will still see disruptors, but I think we’re also going to start seeing some consolidation in the industry as it settles down into a handful of players that people are turning to.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Amanda Heidemann. She’s a physician executive. Today’s KevinMD article is “Gen Z’s DIY approach to health care.” Amanda, let’s end with some take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience.

Amanda Heidemann: We just as physicians have to remember that ultimately it’s all about the patient, and it’s all about us finding ways to meet the patient where they are. So whether it’s us understanding the technologies that patients are using or even using those technologies ourselves, or evolving our practice, evolving how we see people, embracing telehealth, embracing all the new things, it’s all on us to be able to figure out how to meet those patients where they are and get the most out of their health.

Kevin Pho: Amanda, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and insight, and thanks again for coming on the show.

Amanda Heidemann: Thank you.