Kevin Pho is a practicing, board-certified internal medicine physician, a national media commentator, co-author of the book, Establishing, Managing, and Protecting Your Online Reputation: A Social Media Guide for Physicians and Medical Practices, and an acclaimed keynote speaker. He is founder and editor, KevinMD.com, and founder, Physician Speaking by KevinMD.
These perspectives define his unique social media journey, and his story has brought audiences to their feet.
Kevin shares his story nationwide with both clinicians and non-clinicians, and regularly keynotes major conferences.
Kevin built the KevinMD platform from scratch in 2004. It now receives over 3 million monthly page views, and exceeds 250,000 followers on Facebook and Twitter. Kevin was named the web’s top social media influencer in health care and medicine. The New York Times called KevinMD “a highly-coveted publishing place for doctors and patients.” Forbes called KevinMD a “must-read health blog.” And CNN named @KevinMD one of its five recommended Twitter health feeds.
Kevin’s signature keynote, “Connect and be heard: Make a difference in heath care with social media,” takes your audience through Kevin’s social media journey since 2004. With video, audio, and an emphasis on storytelling, he inspires audiences to use social media and be health care influencers in the following ways:
Kevin is the founder of Physician Speaking by KevinMD and is available for speaking opportunities. Please contact us for inquiries.
Not all cancer screening saves lives.
I alluded to this recently in a New York Times’ Room for Debate piece, discussing why Medicare shouldn’t pay for prostate cancer screening in men over the age of 75.
And, when it comes to ovarian cancer screening, a recent study showed that annual CA-125 antigen testing and transvaginal ultrasound did not save lives. In …
Do doctors have more influence than the media in cancer screening?
Occasionally, I’m given the opportunity to write for the New York Times’ Room for Debate blog.
For those who aren’t familiar with the site, every day Room for Debate addresses one question, with various experts chiming in with 300-word op-ed style pieces. Writers normally have overnight to submit their columns.
The recent question asked, “What items and procedures should Medicare stop paying for now, even if patients and their families object?”
Of …
How Twitter helped me find a New York Times column topic
Medical school should be free.
That’s an argument made by physicians Peter B. Bach and Robert Kocher in the New York Times.
This isn’t a new concept. I’ve discussed whether medical school should be free for students who choose primary care. And, for some in the country, it’s already happening. Like at Case Western Reserve University, for instance. The Cleveland Clinic …
Would free medical school be enough to save primary care?
According to one of the the guidelines set forth by the AMA about professionalism in social media, “When physicians see content posted by colleagues that appears unprofessional they have a responsibility to bring that content to the attention of the individual, so that he or she can remove it and/or take other appropriate actions.”
With that in mind, Bryan Vartabedian, who …
How doctors should professionally behave on Twitter
There’s an underlying tension between physicians and health policy experts.
Health policy experts take subtle jibes against physicians in their analyses, with many feeling American doctors are overpaid, which exacerbates health costs. They tend to be politically progressive, and generally dismiss the issues that most doctors care deeply about. Medical malpractice, tort reform and the cost of medical education, for instance.
And …
The tension between physicians and health policy experts
According to a recent study, providing physicians with the cost of lab tests cut costs.
As reported by the WSJ’s Health Blog,
A new study finds that simply making physicians aware of the cost of regular blood tests cut the daily bill for the tests by as much as 27% … At the beginning of the program, the daily cost per …
Doctors should know how much lab tests cost
Little has been written about the impact a malpractice lawsuit has on physicians.
But physicians who’ve been sued have a higher rate of suicide, and emergency physician Edwin Leap wrote about how doctors are emotionally scarred from the grueling ordeal of a trial.
A recent piece from American Medical News puts faces on the toll:
The key to surviving is having …
How malpractice hurts doctors and their future patients
The case of the neurologist who sued a patient for a negative online review has come to an end.
Predictably, the court ruled against the physician and dismissed the lawsuit.
To recap, the physician was upset by the slew of negative online reviews he received, and claimed that the patient,
defamed him and interfered with his business by making false statements to …
Doctors should not sue patients for negative online reviews
It’s certainly been fascinating monitoring the response to Theresa Brown’s New York Times’ op-ed on physician bullying.
Predictably, most physicians were outraged, while the rest of the population generally supported Brown. As alluded to in a comment, whenever you have an aggrieved party accusing another one in a national forum, controversy is what you’re going to get. The piece was the …
Doctor bashing and confronting physicians in the media
Bullying is a problem within health care.
Stung by a physician’s rebuke, Theresa Brown, an oncology nurse, takes to the op-ed pages of the New York Times to address the issue.
In it, she cites several vignettes that paint doctors poorly:
But while most doctors clearly respect their colleagues on the nursing staff, every nurse knows at least one, if not …
Theresa Brown unfairly blames doctors for hospital bullying
A version of this op-ed was published on April 12, 2011 in USA Today.
“Would you like to discuss your end-of-life plans today?”
It’s a question that I ask my patients, although not as often as I would like. Talking about death may be uncomfortable, but it’s a conversation that needs to happen more often.
We can never know …
End of life care is being influenced by politics
Whenever I speak about social media to doctors across the country, I often get asked, “How do I deal with a negative online review?”
Here’s one way not to handle it: sue the patient writing the review.
There’s a well publicized case in Minnesota, where a resident posted a screenshot of …
Dealing with a negative online review on a physician rating site
Medicare is thinking of using patient satisfaction scores in part to determine bonuses to hospitals.
According to Kaiser Health News,
… patient gripes soon will affect how much hospitals get paid by Medicare.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is finalizing details for the new reimbursement method, required by last year’s health care law. Consumer advocates say tying patient …
Patient satisfaction should not influence how doctors are paid
Kimberly Hiatt was a pediatric critical care nurse who accidentally gave an infant a fatal overdose of calcium chloride last year.
By accounts, it was a calculation error. A human mistake.
After the incident, the hospital fired her.
This past April, she took her own life.
Although it cannot be concluded that the tragedy was directly responsible for her suicide, the incident clearly …
Should nurses be fired for fatal medication errors?
Whenever I get asked about how the Affordable Care Act will impact health care, I always say, “look at Massachusetts first.”
That’s because Massachusetts serves as a model for what’s coming ahead for the rest of the country.
As I wrote in 2009, Massachusetts did not provide the primary care infrastructure for near-universal care, which I predicted would drive up emergency room …
Health reform will drive up ER visits, like it did in Massachusetts
I was quoted recently in the New York Times’ Well blog, in a Danielle Ofri piece on Facebook and doctors.
There’s no question that Facebook has been a minefield of sorts for the medical professions, with infractions ranging from unprofessional conduct by medical students to patient privacy violations by attending physicians.
One solution would be for doctors to simply avoid …
How doctors can use Facebook responsibly
It’s commonly thought that rising emergency department expenditures could be curtailed if we could eliminate non-urgent visits.
In Washington state, for instance, lawmakers are proposing limits to the number of times Medicaid recipients can go to the ER.
But what, exactly, is a “non-urgent” visit? And how can patients …
Why denying ER care to patients is bad policy
The Affordable Care Act does very little to reform the medical malpractice system.
It only allocates $50 million to various pilot projects around the country.
A recent piece in the New England Journal of Medicine provides more detail. It appears that, instead of capping non-economic damages, many of the projects have a quality …
A medical malpractice system that reduces errors and improves quality
Much has been written on the death of private practice.
A lion’s share of the reason is economic. It’s becoming financially unfeasible to run a private practice and practice medicine at the same time. The increasing bureaucracy and regulations will only get worse.
And many doctors are responding by becoming employed by hospitals or by large, integrated health practices, and giving up some independence.
Some will continue to resist this trend. But …
New doctors tend to become employed physicians
Patient privacy and social media use in health care often go together when reported in mainstream media.
When physician blogs were a relatively new phenomenon several years ago, the majority of the media coverage focused on edge cases, where doctors inadvertently revealed patient information.
Only a minority of the headlines focused on the positive aspects, such as how …
Doctor reprimanded after patient privacy breached on Facebook, my take
Get free updates delivered free to your inbox.
