Amid all the discussions about patient-centered healthcare during Thursday's opening day of the 9th Annual Connected Health Symposium, perhaps the most striking conclusion came out of the first debate of the day: A well-informed patient is not always a good thing.

Going into the session, which placed Andrew Watson, MD, medical director of UPMC's Center for Connected Medicine, and Jeffrey Benabio, MD, physician director of innovation for Kaiser Permanente, on opposite ends of the spectrum, most of the audience agreed with Watson that online patient communities are "a necessity" and that they're here to stay.

Doctors "have an ethical and moral obligation" to accept and work with online communities, Watson said. "It's a normal aspect of how we take care of patients."

"The bottom line is no one is going to stop the consumer electronics market," he added. "This is where the patients are going, and they're waiting for us."

But Benabio, lamenting the fact that those opposed to online communities are as popular as wrinkles at a Miss America pageant, pointed out that they're not always in the best interest of the patient. There are no clinical studies that demonstrate their effectiveness, he said, and they can do "significant harm" – intentionally or unintentionally.

He described going onto the popular Patients Like Me chatroom and reading a post from a woman who said she'd suffered a seizure after having a flu shot. Several people "liked" that post, he said, even though the seizure was quite likely not caused by the flu shot. In fact, he said, fears of common vaccinations stoked by online communities have led to recent outbreaks of whooping cough, measles and the mumps.

Benabio said physicians already have too much on their plates to be asked to police Internet chatrooms, but those online forums need to be regulated to help patients get the right information and keep them from drawing the wrong conclusions.

"We are drowning our patients in information, but we are starving them of knowledge," he said.

While not entirely disagreeing, Watson argued that physicians need to be more engaged with their patients. He said a better-informed patient will improve the communication between patient and doctor and ultimately lead to better clinical outcomes.

"I don't think it's a matter of protecting (patients), but of enabling them to have a dialogue," he said. "Healthcare right now is scattered and infrequent … and there are a wide variety of questions that patients have – more than we doctors have time to answer, more than we have time to hear."

The concept of connecting the patient to healthcare through new technologies and interactions is at the heart of the Connected Health Symposium, a two-day conference held each year in Boston and sponsored by Partners Healthcare's Center for Connected Health.

This year's conference, which concludes Friday, offered discussions on big data analytics, the Veterans Administration's hugely successful telehealth program, the promise of near-field communications, accountable care organizations, a nationwide health information network and patient experience ratings of primary care physicians. There were demonstrations by dozens of up-and-coming mHealth companies, and more esoteric discussions of the role of behavior change, personal communication and habits in healthcare.