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I started The Pathology Blawg in February 2012, mainly because I wanted to bring attention to important legal, regulatory, professional and ethical issues affecting pathology and laboratory medicine. The blog allowed me to do this in a timely fashion, and in a user-friendly and easily accessible way. I now have just under 11,000 email subscribers and 45,475 page views per month. Based on feedback, I understand that pathologists use the site as a way to keep tabs on what is happening in the industry outside of their own practices. The issues I write about and cover in the webinar program help them understand what labs of all sizes are doing to capture market share, remain compliant with laws and regulations, prepare and react to changes in reimbursement, and improve their business practices.
I’m also regularly contacted by non-pathologists, including everyone from attorneys to financial analysts. I believe this reflects the complexity of the laboratory medicine industry. Because I don’t often write about the “science” of pathology and lab medicine, my audience is overwhelmingly domestic, with approximately 94 percent of my hits coming from the US. But I was contacted just the other day by someone interested in helping me generate more international interest, so things may change.
CAP phones "ringing off the hook"
Probably my biggest success is simply that I am attracting more and more readers every single day without the use of any form of advertising. This means my content remains relevant to people in the industry, which is very important to me. In terms of something tangible where the blog has played a significant role, the one that surprised me the most is the “Doctor of Anatomic Pathology” (DAP) degree issue. Rosalind Franklin University (RFU) very quietly filed a Notice of Intent to create a new doctoral-level degree program for pathologist assistants and planned to enroll students in June 2014. I published an article about the new program on August 29, 2013. According to a source of mine within the College of American Pathologists (CAP), phones there started “ringing off the hook” the day I published the article. Within about two weeks, the Board of Trustees of the American Association of Pathologists’ Assistants unanimously decreed that the DAP title should be reserved only for physicians board certified in anatomic pathology. RFU scuttled the DAP program soon thereafter, which has stuck in my mind as a concrete example of the power of social media.The time dilemma
In spite of the upsides, there remains one big downside to the blog, and that’s the amount of time it takes. If it were my only job, it would be a lot easier, but balancing a full-time medical practice, writing the blog, responding to emails related to the blog, and most importantly, spending time with my family, is difficult at times. I go out of my way to make my articles accurate, fair, easy to read and as comprehensive as possible, and that takes a lot of work. But I love doing it! Surprisingly, despite the fact that I often write about sensitive legal issues, I have yet to receive a cease and desist. This is most likely because, although I often receive information before it is publicly available, I wait to write about it until it is in the public domain. As with so many things, I believe there are multiple factors that contribute to pathologists’ hesitance to use social media professionally. A multitude of sometimes confusing options, paucity of free time, underestimation of how useful and powerful social media can be, and a mistaken impression that social media is only for young people, all likely contribute. But to be fair, I do not believe pathology is the only medical specialty that uses social media too little.My advice
To those who are cynical of social media, I would say there are very few ways in this day and age in which a “normal” person, at little or no cost, can reach and potentially influence thousands of people around the globe. In my case, this is evidenced by the fact that I have been able to assemble a large and growing network of people in the legal, corporate, regulatory, financial and medical sectors who regularly provide me with comments, material, insight, and advice despite the fact that they do not know who I am. Anonymity is important to me simply because I want to keep my life as uncomplicated as possible – and it is not my identity, but the social media platform I have built, that is most important to these people.The material I write about unfortunately does not always put the lab medicine industry in the best light, but I believe it could help the field in the long run. By drawing more attention to the “ugly” side of the industry, conversations can perhaps begin to take place that will hopefully lead to a correction.
The owner of The Pathology Blawg is a surgical pathologist with interests in the medicolegal aspects of pathology and medicine and inappropriate physician self-referral. He wishes to remain anonymous. pathologyblawg.com
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