Medical Center Uses Web Questions to Connect Experts with Patients

"The experts understand that the people who are e-mailing are desperate for information and they're not getting it from their own doctor," says Lindsley. "And, we want to help them as best we can without offering a diagnosis or treatment advice."

Because the experts receive questions from around the world, sometimes this has a bearing on how he or she will answer a question. For example, if a patient lives nearby, the physician may go into greater detail because the patient may someday become a patient.

Regine says that, often times, patients contact him and say they are willing to travel to receive treatment at UMMC. In these cases, he is able to point them toward resources that they didn't know existed in their area, providing them with facility and physician names and phone numbers.

"They're completely unaware of their resources, and it's only through asking a question that they become aware," says Regine.

The most common question asked by patients is if they are a good candidate for a certain procedure. According to Web editor Michelle Murray, those are the questions they like to forward, because it encourages direct interaction and allows the patient to get more information and even set up an appointment for an evaluation.

Other Ask the Expert trends include an increase in questions around a particular topic based on news and current events. For example, they received more questions from parents and patients about the flu after articles and news segments about the severity of the H1N1 virus and the shortage of the vaccine began appearing in the press.

The experts behind the experts
"It's a bit of a workload to monitor the tool to make sure that it's working the way it should for patients, but it's also one of our most popular services," says Schuetz.

Each day, UMMC Web editors look at the incoming questions and forward the ones that are appropriate to experts. If a question has already been answered in the past, the Web editors point the patient to the answer on the site's Ask the Expert archive, located within the main Ask the Expert page.

According to Schuetz, Web analytics show that the archive itself receives a lot of traffic from site users. She says site visitors are reading through the questions that other people have asked and learning from their interactions with UMMC physicians.

"We choose appropriate questions to put on the archive—questions that we think will be of general interest to people looking in those areas," says Murray.

Because of the intense triage that the communications group does with all incoming questions, Regine says he definitely doesn't feel like his time is squandered answering ridiculous questions. He receives approximately two to four questions a week, which he describes as being manageable within his current workload.

There's no "middle man" to be found in this process once the expert receives a question. You'd be hard pressed to find this kind of one-on-one response in the healthcare industry. He or she contacts the patient directly, often leaving a phone number in the event the patient has additional follow up questions.