This transcript of the discussion has been edited for clarity and length.
Mike Sacopulos: We all know a family member, friend, or patient who is self-diagnosed with help from Google. Although some clinicians roll their eyes when a patient produces reams of printouts on a medical condition, the internet has opened doors to health education. We know that more engaged, informed patients have better outcomes. One of the top sources of health information for the public is WebMD.
My guest today is John Whyte, MD, MPH, a practicing physician. He has worked at the FDA and was chief medical officer and vice president of health and medical education for the Discovery Channel. Currently, Whyte is the chief medical officer at WebMD. John Whyte, welcome to SoundPractice.
John Whyte: Thanks for having me. I’m delighted to be with you.
Sacopulos: It’s my absolute pleasure. Dr. Whyte, as you know, this is the podcast for the American Association for Physician Leadership. Could you describe your path as a physician leader?
Whyte: Sure. And what I love about this podcast is it’s very different today than we would’ve done 20 years ago, when everyone who graduated medical school basically was a full-time clinician for the most part. Now we’ve seen that you can do other things as well as keep your identity as a physician, and that’s what I’ve done in terms of my career. If you had asked my younger self, I would’ve said I’d be a surgeon. Well, I’m not a surgeon; I’m an internist. And my path has been one that I really have been interested in the patient in front of me, but also populations of patients.
So that’s where I’ve been interested in health communication. That’s where I’ve been interested in health policy, in going in and out of government. But as we talked about before we came on, I’ve always seen patients. I’ve always maintained that clinical hand. And that’s by design. It takes a lot of work to schedule it. You must declare that upfront when you’re taking a new position, and everyone has embraced it because I think continuing to be involved in the clinical enterprise while being involved in a business aspect or a policy aspect improves all of the functions that one does.
Sacopulos: Fabulous. Well, I’m generally familiar with WebMD. Could you give me an overview of the scope and reach of WebMD?
Whyte: WebMD is really multiple companies in the sense that WebMD is the consumer brand everyone knows where 75 million unique visitors come to the website every month searching for health information. There’s also, as many of your audience members will know, Medscape, which is the physician portal. We have 7 million users globally. Nearly a million physicians in the United States use it for things like continuing medical education as well as just trying to learn what’s best clinical practice.
Then, we also have something called WebMD Health Services, where we do a lot with health systems, employers, and insurers, with a lot of health coaching for patients to help them in that diabetes journey, that overweight and obesity journey. So, it’s more than just the website that people know as WebMD; we have multiple components to it.
Sacopulos: What are the popular topics with WebMD? Were you ever surprised by a topic becoming popular that you didn’t think would be?
Whyte: If we put anything about feet on the website or in our newsletters, things about the feet always do well. You put an article about sandals, how they can be bad for your feet, it’s going to be one of the top pieces of content for the month. The eyes are always very popular. People are particularly focused on their vision. So those are the unusual ones. The common ones I’m not surprised by: people search a great deal about cancer, they search diabetes, heart disease, the ailments that afflict many people. But the feet is what surprised me.
Sacopulos: I will say that is surprising. And as a trained attorney, I know not to ask a question that I don’t know the answer. So, I am going to abandon this line of questioning immediately, Dr. Whyte, and we’re going to move away from the feet.
In preparation for this interview, I read WebMD’s Editorial Policy, which reads in part: “Our mission is to bring you the most objective, trustworthy, and accurate health information.” And it seems to me this isn’t always easy to do when dealing with new information. How do you separate fringe from cutting edge?
Whyte: And I’ll tell you, we talk a lot about social determinants of health. We certainly have learned much more about that during the pandemic, but information is a social determinant of health, and that is critically important. And I’m proud of the work that we’ve done, particularly during the COVID pandemic.
People may not realize this — I’m very proud of this, that’s why I’m saying it so boldly — every piece of content on WebMD is reviewed by a board-certified expert. And if you look closely at the bottom of the page that you’re reviewing, you will see who reviewed it. You can hyperlink to them to see what their area of expertise is, and it will show you the date. And the date is very important, especially as we learn about new information.
We’ve learned over the years that better information is going to lead to better health. The way that we search is very different today than it was even five years ago. A lot of my physician friends joke with me, and they’ll be like, “Oh, I see so many patients that went to WebMD first and then come to me.” Most of it is ribbing because our symptom checker is very good, it’s powered by AI, and continues to evolve.
Everything is not cancer when you come to WebMD, but we don’t try to replace the visit to the physician. What we really try to do is empower the patient with the right information, maybe the right questions to ask, how to know when something is serious that requires a more urgent visit versus one that can be a more routine visit. And that takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of time and review, but we always stay focused on what’s the best information that we have today, looking at credible sources, credible experts.
The problem nowadays is that every influencer who has a million followers on Instagram or Facebook or TikTok — that doesn’t make them an expert. And all too often, people feel that’s the case. It can get frustrating. If I asked you, “Do you listen to any financial advice that you read on a blog or are you going to go to the financial expert that has the most followers on TikTok?” You’d be like, “No way. That’s too important. I’ve got to check who’s telling me the information. I’ve got to look around and see if I heard that anywhere else. I need to corroborate that.”
Well, our health, I could argue, is more important than our finances. And yet sometimes with our health we’re more liberal in terms of, “Hey, my friend told me I should try this.” And we should have the same prism in terms of how we look at our finances as how we look at our health.
Sacopulos: That’s a great point. You started to allude to this a little bit, but in recent years we’ve seen certain medical topics take on a political dimension. I’m sure everybody following along is going to instantly think of vaccines or gender-affirming surgery, abortion — all trigger partisan reactions in our country right now. How, as chief medical officer of a site for the public, do you deal with this?
Whyte: This comes up in our editorial conversations all the time. We often have to remove the ability to comment on some of our posts that generate a lot of negative comments in terms of misinformation. But it still goes back to everything that you talked about in terms of vaccines, gender-affirming surgery, and abortion, that have a scientific medical rationale behind them. And that’s what we focus on. We are apolitical. We’re not taking a particular position on the role of government in these elements, but talking about the science behind all of the issues that you just mentioned and focusing on the data that we have.
Sacopulos: State legislatures are taking on a more active role in controlling the practice of medicine, from what questions may not be asked in a pediatric exam room to what procedures may not be performed in the OR. Physicians’ authorities are being somewhat limited in many states. Does this impact the public’s trust in the medical profession?
Whyte: Absolutely. And to be fair, as you know, physicians, pharmacists, nurses, we’re all licensed by our state boards. I worked at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. People don’t recognize the fact that the FDA doesn’t regulate physicians. FDA regulates sponsors, manufacturers of drugs, but the states are what determine the practice of medicine. And in some ways, that’s how it should be, based on data and evidence and peers. And that’s what we have in state boards of medicine.
I don’t know a lot about engineering. I don’t know a lot about aerospace. So, I try to stay out of those areas because I don’t know about them. And when we have some folks who are opining about the role of physicians and pharmacists and nurses and what they can and cannot do it is very problematic. I don’t know the practice of law, so I shouldn’t be giving advice as to how people should practice law, and maybe people who don’t practice medicine shouldn’t be giving so much advice about what we can and cannot do.
Sacopulos: Hear! Hear! Dr. Whyte, unfortunately there are discrepancies in medical care and treatment based upon socioeconomics in this country and others. Does WebMD address these discrepancies, and if so, how?
Whyte: You do not know this, but I’ve been passionate about the topic of disparities for more than 20 years, that we can receive different levels of care based on our sex, our race, our ethnicity. Our zip code matters more than our genetic code.
I live in the Washington, DC, area, the most powerful city in the world, and we can have these tremendous differences in longevity based on where people are on the metro line, which is largely determined by the color of their skin. And that is very problematic. Even when we make progress, all ships don’t rise equally. So we still have these disparities that persist, and the COVID pandemic taught us that.
One of the things that I’ve been very focused on during my time as the chief medical officer at WebMD is that we have a diversity of images. We’re a website or a platform. I need to see people who look like America and the world and the profession. I want to see people of color who are physicians, who are nurses and pharmacists. I don’t want them to always be the patients.
We have talked about the difference in the presentation of certain diseases based on the color of one’s skin, particularly in terms of dermatology: skin disease, psoriasis, eczema. We know they can present differently. And traditionally, we’ve learned on pictures of Caucasians.
I’ve been very big on focusing on how women receive different care when they present in the ER, when they present with chest pain. So how do we address that, particularly on our Medscape brand? We created a whole pillar relating to addressing issues of disparity and focusing on health equity.
It’s a topic I’m profoundly passionate about in terms of the changes that we need to continue to make. There’s a lot we need to do, and I’m very proud of the work that we’re doing and continue to do in terms of addressing images, but also the content of what we’re covering and the diagnosis and the management of disease and recognizing how it can present differently.
Sacopulos: Is it difficult to know at what level to pitch content to the public? Obviously, medicine is an involved and complex topic and you have a lay public. Is it difficult to get it at the right level for folks?
Whyte: The good news, in a way, is that we have real-time metrics that you don’t have in some other businesses. I can create a video interview or an animation, post it on the site, promote it on social media, and look at results on an hourly basis. Honestly, within the first 24–48 hours nowadays, I’ll know if this is going to be successful or not.
Many times, we think we’ll build something, and people will come. We’ll create a terrific website, and people are just going to consume it. And there are lots of reasons people come to a site or not, but you need to be guided by data. That’s something I learned as a physician: Guide your decisions by data.
So, if something’s not working and you see that because there are not many views, or people are watching only 10 seconds of it and then tuning it out, or they’re not sharing or engaging, you know that you need to find another strategy to get that information out there. And that’s what good platforms do: They continue to iterate.
Sacopulos: I understand that you created through LinkedIn Learning a course entitled Think Like a Doctor. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Whyte: They have a course called Think Like a Lawyer, and it has done very well. So, they approached me about doing this course to Think Like a Doctor. At first, I thought, “Oh, I want to talk about diabetes. I want to talk about cancer. I want to talk about heart disease.” They said, “No, no, no. LinkedIn’s not the platform for that.” And they’re right because LinkedIn is about your profession. It’s about getting the right skillsets to succeed in business.
So I learned from that. Then it really was a discussion with the team at LinkedIn as well as my colleagues at WebMD and Medscape around what I do as a physician in terms of a decision-making process that can help other leaders who are not in the profession of medicine improve their skills. It was fun to work with the folks at LinkedIn to bring it to the level of “everything isn’t the emergency room setting that we see on TV,” that there are some principles that are easily generalizable to other professions.
Sacopulos: Interesting. WebMD Care helps patients find medical providers by specialty and geographic location. There are even WebMD Patient Choice Awards. Can you tell me how all this service works for the public?
Whyte: Five years ago, people would search a piece of content — joint pain, muscle aches, high cholesterol — and they’d print it all out and bring it to the doctor and say, “Tell me what to do.” And then you, as a doctor, put it to the side and do what you want.
Now, people search content, but they want to connect that to care, and they want to do that now. Why should I wait six weeks for a doctor’s appointment? Why should I wait six months, which it is in some places for a dermatology appointment, when I could be connected to someone now, perhaps through a telemedicine visit? Or I could get help identifying someone in my geographic area that I might be able to see and read the reviews and learn more about.
So I’m very excited about these tools really helping empower patients to make that connection of content to care, because that’s where we’ve moved over the last three years, particularly during the pandemic.
Sacopulos: Absolutely. Dr. Whyte, as our time together comes to an end, I’m interested in what’s next for you and WebMD. What can we expect in the future?
Whyte: I think we’ll continue to iterate our brand as more than just an online platform. How do we create more thought leadership around important health topics? How can we be a convener of different perspectives and promote discussion around important public health topics as well as medical topics? How do we manage certain diseases? How do we focus more on prevention? There’s been a lot of talk that we’re really a sick-care system and not a well-care system. So how do we get people more interested in prevention?
There’s so much excitement going on right now in health and medicine. I’m particularly interested in how we use digital tools and artificial intelligence, and I think you’ll hear more about that and how we truly personalize medicine, because we can do that now. Everyone’s collecting their own data through wearables and sensors and trackers. How do we use that to provide you better care? That’s the real excitement.
If we had more time, I’d talk to you about the smart toilet and the urine test that we can do at home. The bathroom is the future doctor’s office. That’s what we’re going to be talking about and that you’ll be hearing.
Sacopulos: Excellent. We’ll leave that as a teaser. Dr. John Whyte, thank you for your time and thank you for all the good work that you do at WebMD.
Whyte: Absolutely. I’ve enjoyed our discussion.
Sacopulos: My thanks to John Whyte. Dr. Whyte and his colleagues at WebMD perform an important service by providing quality health information to our fellow citizens.