10 Questions With KevinMD (aka Dr. Kevin Pho)

DJ Smith / Mar 20th / Comments

This week we’re talking with Dr. Kevin Pho, a practicing primary care physician in Nashua, New Hampshire. He is board-certified in Internal Medicine, and his opinion pieces have appeared in both national and local newspapers. In October, 2007, Dr. Pho appeared on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. He is also a member of the USA Today’s Board of Contributors.

Dr. Pho blogs at KevinMD.com, named Best Medical Blog in the 2008 Medical Weblog Awards, with over 21,000+ RSS subscribers and 3,100+ Twitter followers.

D.J.: What first drew you to establishing your own blog?

KevinMD: I started a blog in 2004, and it was really to give a physician’s take and interpretation of current medical news. A lot of times, you’ll see news stories and health stories come out in the newspaper or on TV news and it was done without contacting a physician. A lot of times these studies can be misconstrued by patients, and I wanted to give a physician’s take on what’s going on, and a blog was the easiest way to do that.

D.J.: As a practicing physician, your daily schedule is obviously packed. How do you make time to blog so frequently?

KevinMD: Well, it’s definitely a time commitment, and I would say that blogging is not for everybody. I think that it does take an additional 2-3 hours per day, reading the various sources that I do. I do it because I really do enjoy keeping up with the news and, by writing about it, it really helps me stay up to date. But, as you can imagine, seeing a full patient panel, it does take a lot of time. So I do most of my blogging early in the morning before I see patients and late at night after everyone in the house is sleeping.

D.J.: What do you see is the biggest misconception about maintaining a healthcare blog?

KevinMD: I think the biggest misconception is that it’s difficult to do one. I think starting a blog itself is very, very easy. There are a lot of tools that are free and people who aren’t as versed with the Internet and blogs can easily start one up within 15 minutes with little or no computer knowledge.

D.J.: How would you describe the majority of your audience?

KevinMD: I don’t know specifically, but I know that I target my writing to physicians and medical professionals, as well as patients. I have a variety of topics that physicians certainly can relate to and I always talk about issues that are of relevance to practicing doctors, but I also make it a point to write to patients because I think one of the strengths of the blog is to offer a view behind the scenes of what doctors are facing. If patients realize some of the issues that concern doctors, it’s going to really help us in terms of health reform and in terms of addressing some of the problems that doctors face today.

D.J.: Why do you think that you have been so successful in attracting followers?

KevinMD: It’s persistence. When you start a blog you have to stick to a schedule and I post normally three times a day. When you have a readership that looks forward to that schedule, then it can certainly grow.  I have posted almost everyday. There are very few days that I don’t post unless I’m on vacation and what not.  So I think that posting regularly is very important.  I also have different mediums that people can access my blog through. I have the blog itself.  I have a link to my post served up on twitter, so that it exposes the blog to a different audience. People who don’t want to go to blog itself can read my posts through a RSS reader or they can subscribe by e-mail newsletter. Having a variety of means that people can access your writing is important, and the fact that they all go back to the blog – it kind of helps identify your brand within the Internet and that helps increase readership.

D.J.: Are any patients or colleagues following you worried that you’ll blog about them?

KevinMD: I make it a point up front that I do not blog about patients. People know my name; people know that I do blog. I’ve been profiled in local newspapers, and I don’t want patients to worry that whatever I say to them in an exam room will get out on a blog. I stick more to medical issues. I know that other physician blogs do blog about patients, and I think that is one of the concerns about blogging – the maintenance of patient privacy. A lot of doctors who do blog about patients are certainly aware of that and they change all relevant information so that no one is identifiable, however, speaking personally, I just take that off the table by saying I simply don’t blog about patients.

D.J.: You have advertisements on your blog site. Has that been a beneficial move for you?

KevinMD: It’s a personal decision. As the blog becomes more successful, there’s more traffic, and it makes it more expensive to run in terms of bandwidth costs. The advertisements I have on the blog help me pay for the bandwidth, which can be significant with the traffic that I receive. Also, not all the advertisements on the blog are financial arrangements. Sometimes if I want to expose my blog to a different audience, we will do a banner exchange where I would advertise their site on my blog and then that site would advertise my blog and expose my brand to their audience. I can say that not all the advertisements are financially based and some of them are because I want to expose my blog to a different audience and expand its reach.

D.J.: What blogs do you follow?

KevinMD: I follow all of my blogs through Google Reader, which is an RSS-based reader. I literally have between 750-1000 sources that I read through so naming just a few is really hard. Certainly I follow the blog of the major newspapers. I think the two best major media blogs are the health blogs of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Those are two of the best mainstream media blogs. In terms of blogs of primary care doctors, I follow the blog of Rob Lamberts, called Musings of a Distractible Mind. It really gives a unique take into the world of primary care. I follow blogs dealing with health policy because I think physicians need to be versed on health policy to anticipate how that’s going to change their practice. One of the best I follow is Maggie Mahar’s Health Beat blog.

D.J: Do you think that more healthcare professionals should make an online presence for themselves?

KevinMD: Absolutely.  With more patients searching for both health information and doctors on search engines like Google, it’s imperative for physicians to control what comes up when their name is searched.  The best way of doing so is with an online presence, such as a blog, or a profile on social network sites like LinkedIn or Facebook.

It is better to be proactive in controlling the information attached to your name, rather than having a third party like a newspaper or an online review define you on the Internet.

D.J.: What advice would you give to a professional looking to follow in your footsteps and start their own blog?

KevinMD: Don’t be discouraged; actually starting a blog is very easy. If they want it to be a successful blog and gain a lot of readership and traffic, it does take a time commitment. People who believe that they can just do this in their spare time fail to realize what kind of time commitment it takes to persistently write and read the amount of material they need to in order to run a successful blog. Any start up is easy, but doctors or people who, in the medical profession, want to maintain a blog have to realize that this is indeed a time commitment and only to do it if that’s something they want to do.

Bonus question:
D.J.: If you could change one thing about healthcare what would it be?

KevinMD: I want patients, as well as the powers to be, to value what primary care can do to improve healthcare and improve a patient’s well-being. Right now in primary care, and I’m a primary care doc so obviously I’m a little bit biased, I do think primary care is undervalued, and that’s really to the detriment to our health system as a whole. Systems that rely more on primary care have patients who fare better and do so at lower cost. I think that if the United States valued primary care, more so than they do now, it’s going to go a long way to help some of the problems that the healthcare system is currently facing.

I would like to thank Dr. Pho for taking time out of his busy schedule for this interview. You may follow Dr. Pho on Twitter or e-mail him at kevinmd@gmail.com.

If you or someone you know would like to participate in The Pulses’ “10 Question With…” please contact me at dj@talstone.com or you can connect with me on Twitter.