Ask a Texas Heart Institute Doctor Reaching Online Public
(News of Note - December 31, 2008) Three months after going online, Ask a Texas Heart Institute Doctor has already shared the expertise of institute physicians with nearly 3,000 visitors to the Texas Heart Institute (THI) website. This feature of the Heart Information Center extends THI’s mission to educate and share knowledge about heart-health with the public. Anyone with Internet access can go to the website and ask a question or search previous answers to questions about cardiovascular health or disease. Members of the Texas Heart Institute professional staff provide answers, which are then posted on the website at www.texasheart.org/heartdoctor.
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More than 170 questions have been submitted to the service which now includes 31 THI physicians. Participants from all over the United States and the world are encouraged to ask questions whose answers will benefit the public in general, rather than questions about the individual’s specific health condition. Answers to 100 appropriate questions have been posted on the website along with links to more information in the Heart Information Center (HIC). Those questions not posted on the web have been answered by HIC staff members. The HIC maintains a resource center open to the public and responded to more than 3,500 e-mails and phone calls in 2008 as a result of the well-established e-mail and 800-number phone service.
Many of the pages in Ask a Texas Heart Institute Doctor have already found their way to the top of search engine rankings in Google, Yahoo and MSN. For example, Ask a Texas Heart Institute Doctor is currently listed number one out of 678,000 results in a Google search for the term “ask a heart doctor.” The idea for this service was the concept of THI professional staff cardiologist Dr. Mehdi Razavi who explained, “The Internet is a powerful communication tool and we look forward to empowering the public with accurate, current information in an accessible way. Most people already use the Internet to search for healthrelated information. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t get precise information from an expert source.”
Dr. Razavi related a patient success story that shows how far reaching the new service is: “Recently I saw a patient from Orlando who had an unusually rapid heartbeat. She had read Ask a Texas Heart Institute Heart Doctor and wanted to have the ablation, or corrective procedure, done here. Importantly, she knew to avoid caffeine per one of our recent answers on the website. Hopefully, as this project grows, we will have more such stories.”
For Texas Heart Institute media profiles, see Public Affairs.
