Podiatrist Influencer Uses Social Media to Enhance Patient Experience

Dr. Tom Biernacki, a podiatrist and foot and ankle surgeon. (Courtesy of Dr. Tom Biernacki)

When his first video went viral in 2015, the excitement was almost scary. Few doctor influencers existed in the YouTube universe then.

Dr. Tom Biernacki, a podiatrist and foot and ankle surgeon, said his one-minute video removing an ingrown toenail reached about 3 million views within days. A few additional ones based on PowerPoint presentations also got nearly 100,000 views.

Patients’ reactions were positive, and many called to ask to see him, he recalled. That attracted the attention of his then-employer, who asked him to take the videos down.

The employer was concerned about potential legal liabilities even though he only showed the patient’s toes and had obtained the patient’s permission for the video. He, too, was worried about any audience getting hurt by the information in his videos. So he deleted them.

After that, he didn’t make any videos for three years.

Meanwhile, one dissatisfaction grew over time: his limited face time with patients. He said that a patient has five to ten minutes with a doctor who barely has the time to introduce himself, get input from the patient, and write a prescription.

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In 2019, with the support of his new employer, he resumed making videos to extend the time he could use to educate patients. While he rarely had over 10 minutes with patients during their visits, a half-an-hour video could systematically explain more things.

Now, almost all of his new patients found him through the videos. “People specifically come to see you, and it’s a different type of patient,” he told The Epoch Times. “They walk in already knowing exactly what they want from the videos.”

That makes the visit “very effective.” He said he could communicate with patients at a different trust level. He would point the patient to a video when he didn’t have enough time for a patient during a visit. He also started making more videos about specific podiatric issues.

To Dr. Biernacki, the videos give him professional satisfaction through enhanced patient experience.

“Because of the videos, my success rate of helping people has gone up. I’d say at least 90 percent of the people are really happy with their appointments,” he said.

He said the videos also allow him to cover health issues preventively versus the reactive style in hospitals.

“For example, in the hospital, you can never really talk about, ‘What’s your diet?’ ‘What’s your exercise plan?’ ‘What kind of shoes are you wearing?’ All you can really do is to book people for surgery and write the prescriptions.”

Joining Gan Jing World

In June, Dr. Biernacki added a member to his social media ensemble: Gan Jing World, a new digital platform.

“Gan Jing means clean,” reads the platform’s official website, founded by Chinese Americans in New York last year.

“Our mission is to create the world’s largest entertainment community, providing uplifting and meaningful content and family-friendly entertainment for all ages,” the company states. “We want to create an online platform free from violent, erotic, criminal, and harmful content for kids and adults alike to enjoy safely.”

For Dr. Biernacki, his channel aligns with the platform because both are “creating benefit for the world.” “It’s not really creating a spectacle to get attention, which usually leads people to do non-clean things. I don’t think that’s what my format relies on. So, from that standpoint, I thought it was a good fit.”

He added that Gan Jing World’s mission statement is all the things he believed in as well.

He currently syncs all his YouTube videos with his channel on Gan Jing World, which he calls “a good competitor to YouTube.”

He said his social media channels have grown in the past five years; the video views are above 300,000 daily. The average watch time is about four and a half minutes per video, and just the day before the interview, his videos had nearly 15,000 hours of combined watch time, according to him.

“On a hard day at work, I can do maybe 12 hours helping people,” said Dr. Biernacki, content with his videos’ reach. “How does that compare to 15,000 hours? That doesn’t even compare.”