Healthcare social media a ‘moral obligation’

As social media continues to grow as a communications medium, so too does its impact in healthcare. According to a report published today by consulting firm PwC, patients increasingly are turning to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter both to find and share medical information. What’s more, of 1,060 surveyed consumers, 45 percent said that information obtained via social media could impact their decision to get a second opinion.

“Business strategies that include social media can help health industry companies to take a more active, engaged role in managing individuals’ health,” the report authors said. “Organizations should coordinate internally to effectively integrate information from the social media space and connect with their customers in more meaningful ways that provide value and increase trust.”

The report’s authors also found that 33 percent of responding consumers have used social media to find information about diseases posted by other patients; one-quarter of respondents said they’d actually posted information about their health experiences online.

Farris Timimi, M.D., medical director for the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, talked about the impact, specifically of the former, at the ninth annual World Health Care Congress in Washington, D.C., on Monday, saying that social media needs to be grown and nurtured for patients.

“Our patients are there. Our moral obligation is to meet them where they’re at and give them the information they need so they can seek recovery,” Timimi said. “You’ve got to be ready for it. You build it for the patients; not for yourself.

“This is not marketing,” he added. “This is the right thing to do.”

Twitter for healthcare.. 50 million tweets and counting

Health, whether our own or that of someone close to us, carries a high level of importance, interest, and ultimately common ground.  And because of that we tend to talk about it.  We seek knowledge and support.  And with the rise of healthcare social media our ability connect with those who share our desire to converse and learn from one another has opened up amazing possibilities. Enter Twitter for healthcare.

Communities connecting via Twitter for healthcare

Twitter is certainly one of the easiest social media platforms out there on which to find and connect with individuals who share our interests.  That’s because it’s largely an open platform.  One that encourages connecting with people who we otherwise may never have known.  And that holds true when you consider Twitter for healthcare.  However, healthcare has an incredibly diverse presence on Twitter because of the many specialized needs that exist … each with issues that are uniquely their own.

We launched the Healthcare Hashtag Project eighteen months ago with the intent of helping to lower the barriers to using Twitter for healthcare interests.  From the start it was intended as being a way of finding the conversations relevant to your own health interests, to discover who the thought leaders are, and above all to engage and contribute to conversations and discovery.

In that time we’ve seen advocates, providers, and patients alike flock to the project, provide us with numerous inspiring ideas, and contribute many new healthcare hashtags that have helped to facilitate the expansion of engagement and the birth of new online healthcare communities.

Twitter grants special permission to the Healthcare Hashtag Project

The Healthcare Hashtag project doesn’t rely on the standard data that’s available from Twitter.  We’ve gained “elevated” privileges to the the Twitter Stream API from them.  Thus, we’re able to track many more hashtags than we otherwise would have been able to.  So let’s not forget to give a nod and a “thank you” to Twitter for helping the healthcare community to flourish on their platform.

Why should I use Twitter for healthcare exploration and engagement?

At the Healthcare Hashtag Project  the community contributions and the expanding role of Twitter in healthcare have resulted in a captured conversation that just recently crossed the 50 million tweet threshold!  That’s 50 million individual pieces of healthcare information shared.  And it’s now at a level to where it’s growing at a rate of over 1 million healthcare related tweets per week.  Too much for you to keep track of?  No worries, we’ve got a complete, free transcript service that allows you to retrieve all of them.  Just check out one of our individual hashtag pages to get the twitter transcript for that hashtag within the date parameters you specify.

Want more evidence that Twitter is one of the leading social media platforms for healthcare?   Explore the project yourself.  And once you do, I hope that you’ll be inspired to contribute to the ever expanding healthcare conversation taking place on Twitter via the use of healthcare hashtags.  Let your voice be heard … and tune in to the many other voices who are sharing as well.

Twitter for healthcare is alive and well.

Most hospitals don’t budget, plan for social media

While a majority of hospitals (nine out of 10) have jumped on the social media bandwagon, a good portion of those facilities (two-thirds) have no formal ideas for how that media should be used, a study released in January by Greystone.Net found. Some healthcare bloggers, however, fear that the number of hospitals with a plan could be even less. 

“Greystone.Net’s percentage of engaged hospitals seems overly optimistic,” said blogger Jennifer Riggle, associate vice president at PR firm CRT/tanaka, according to Healthcare IT News. “I hazard to guess that many hospitals are simply setting up Twitter accounts, posting videos on YouTube and creating Facebook pages without thinking how they can use these tools to support their service lines and improve communications with the community they serve.” 

Riggle’s concerns may be valid ones, as the study showed that Twitter, YouTube and Facebook were the most popular forms of social media used. While 92 percent of hospitals and health systems cited a desire to bring in new patients as the reasoning behind engaging in social media, just under 13 percent had any success doing so. 

The study also found that few hospitals even do so much as budgeting financially for social media, meaning most facilities currently aren’t hiring employees to handle such tasks. In fact, 70 percent of the hospitals surveyed reported that they had no more than three people dedicated to social media. 

Patients choose hospitals based on social media

With one-third of consumers using social media for seeking or sharing medical information, 41 percent say tools like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and online forums influence their choice of a specific hospital, medical facility or doctor, according to Tuesday’s report from consulting firm PwC.

“Our patients are there. Our moral obligation is to meet them where they’re at and give them the information they need so they can seek recovery,” Timimi said. “This is not marketing; this is the right thing to do.”

In a survey of more than a thousand consumers, more than two-fifths of individuals said social media did affect their choice of a provider or organization. Forty-five percent said it would affect their decision to get a second opinion; 34 percent said it would influence their decision about taking a certain medication and 32 percent said it would affect their choice of a health insurance plan.

The PwC report follows a study last summer by hospital market research firm YouGov Healthcare, which found that 57 percent of consumers said a hospital’s social media connections would strongly affect their decision to receive treatment at that facility.

Following the release of the study, YouGov Healthcare Managing Director Jane Donohue told FierceHealthcare, “We were surprised that consumers were going to review sites and blogs as often as they are going to the official hospital sites.” She added, “Clearly, any successful social media strategy is going to have to monitor and engage those [review site] conversations because you don’t control them. With your own content on Facebook and Twitter, you have a lot of control, but you certainly need to be engaged in those conversations.”

However, as one reader noted on the story, “This is the kind of research that ends up misleading healthcare managers to go down a strategic path to nowhere. … Social media is a valuable and growing tool for communication, but it is nowhere near the usage deciding factor.”

Even if the studies overestimate social media’s impact on consumer behavior, other experts say it goes beyond marketing.

“Savvy adopters are viewing social media as a business strategy, not just a marketing tool,” Kelly Barnes, US Health Industries leader of PwC, said in a company announcement.

Farris Timimi, medical director for the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, said social media in healthcare is a “moral obligation,” at the ninth annual World Health Care Congress in in National Harbor, Md., on Monday, FierceHealthIT reported.

Hospitals now using social media to draw new patients

Hospitals are turning to social networking in an effort to market themselves to new patients who seem to be looking more to social media to choose the kinds of products and services they use. Hospitals have ramped up their online marketing campaigns after finding that many patients rely less on referrals and more on social media when picking services.

Earlier this year, a Baltimore television station incorrectly reported that Greater Baltimore Medical Center had been invaded by an armed robber. Naturally, the Twitter-verse was aflutter. After the news broadcast, Michael Schwartzberg, media relations manager of GBMC, sent out a slew of tweets correcting the misinformation. This is new territory for medical marketing. Ten years ago, it was innovative if hospitals had websites. Now, medical institutions are tweeting, creating Facebook pages, making videos for YouTube, and posting photos to Flickr.

In this technology-driven age, consumers are relying less on word-of-mouth referrals and looking more to social-media outlets to choose the kinds of products and services they use—including health care. In response, hospitals have ramped up their online marketing campaigns.

“I think the amount of competition in this direct area affects a lot of the things we do [in social media],” said Betsey Haley, communications and social-media manager for LifeBridge Health.LifeBridge spreads its online presence throughout five different social-media platforms plus its website.The LifeBridge Twitter account and Blogspot blog is updated regularly and provides health care information to patients, while its Facebook page is used as a job and career board. LifeBridge also has its own channels on YouTube and ICYou, an online health video source. “We look at social media as a new and interesting way to communicate with people,” Haley said.

Federal health reform is helping to put patients at the center of their care too, which means consumers will have more options.“With or without health care reform, social media has a relevant place in our landscape of navigating health information and health care decisions,” said Kathy Smith, director of market development for Johns Hopkins Medicine. Hopkins has social-media communities on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. “By actively engaging in social media, we have the opportunity to reach audiences on a platform where they feel comfortable,” Smith said. She said patients are definitely paying attention to different social-media avenues as a way to connect with health care professionals and get health information at the click of a mouse.

“Today’s health consumer is much more mobile than they once were,” Schwartzberg said. Schwartzberg said GBMC uses its social-media platform for media relations, customer service, crisis communication—such as H1N1 updates, community relations, and human resources.

Kevin Cservek, a spokesman for Baltimore Washington Medical Center, said the hospital has a Facebook page and Twitter account that are updated daily. Cservek also runs a YouTube channel, which so far features interviews with physicians about heart disease. A Flickr site boasts photos from various events.

Cservek said social media won’t replace traditional marketing, but it is another avenue hospitals can use to reach patients. At a recent free screening for prostate cancer, Cservek said that out of 100 people that attended, about a handful of men said they found out about the screening on Facebook.

“For commercial brands like an energy drink or a new line of clothing, I think social media has a lot of value,” said Vivienne Stearns-Elliott, media relations officer for St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson, Maryland.But she is still skeptical of the value of social media for hospitals, especially since many elderly and low-income patients do not have regular access to a computer.

Study Reveals How Social Media Benefits the Healthcare Industry

Social media is used in a variety of industries, including news, construction, entertainment, and so on. According to a survey by accounting firm PwC, people are also turning to social media for healthcare purposes.

PwC surveyed 1,000 adults and found that nearly a third had used social media for healthcare purposes. The results weren’t all that surprising though. The survey showed that younger people are more likely to turn to social media for healthcare related issues, including filing a complaint and looking up informational videos on YouTube.

People searching for healthcare information turned to Facebook with 18 percent of those surveyed visiting the site, followed by YouTube with 12 percent, blogs at nine percent, and somewhat surprisingly, Google+ with eight percent.

While social media has helped in terms of education, only five percent of those surveyed said they would be swayed to choose one hospital over another based on its social presence – compared to the 30 percent that would choose a hospital based on its privacy policy.

Although regulations, security breaches, and privacy concerns limit how patients and healthcare providers use social media, PwC concluded that it would continue to be a resource for both providers and consumers. While you might not be able to interact directly with patients, brands and businesses should continue using social media to educate consumers about the healthcare industry.

Embracing Social Media

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