The Center for Connected Health reports that Twitter will be an effective tool to notify the public of medical alerts and information. As we’ve seen with recent news events, including the Hudson River landing a few months ago and tales of people in trouble who tweeted for help, citizen journalism and Twitter are powerful tools to spread news quickly.
But, UPI reports that the key to Twitter’s success as a mass communication tool for such a serious subject will rely on ensuring cautiousness to avoid public panic and protect confidentiality and patient privacy.
While new media is certainly important and citizen journalism intriguing, all industries, and specifically the health industry, will soon have to take steps to remedy situations that may arise from inaccurately reported or false news from unofficial sources that could lead to public panic. Naturally, this is an even greater concern when one’s health is at stake. I’ll certainly be on the watch for government and health agencies developing standards and protocols to protect confidentiality and ensure cautiousness while disseminating news through social media channels, will you?
As I’ve written about before on this blog, the web is starting to transform how we, as patients, obtain healthcare information. Recognizing this, healthcare companies have become much more aggressive in how they’re using the web, specifically social media, to disseminate information. Forbes recently reported on a creative way one organization chose to promote a pivotal study.
In the Forbes piece, reporter Rebecca Ruiz, explains how the Mayo Clinic out of Rochester, Minn used Twitter to tease an upcoming study on celiac disease. They followed the folks re-tweeting the news and chose a select few to share the findings with exclusively. What’s unique about this, is that Mayo didn’t give the results to traditional reporters. They gave them patients with celiac and offered them an embargo of the study, with free reign to blog about it. A privilege typically reserved for journalists.
The results were also distributed on Facebook and through this YouTube video.
This example from Mayo is likely to be the wave of the future. Undoubtedly, more and more healthcare organizations will begin using Facebook, Twitter and other emerging social media tools and communities to reach out directly to the people affected by the disease states and conditions for which they are providing education. It will be interesting to see how these interactions impact new and traditional media as well as the consumption of healthcare information.
The Forbes piece also includes a great slideshow that highlights the best resources on the web for obtaining healthcare info. Check it out here.
Recently we had the opportunity to chat with new media evangelist and consultant, Ron Ploof, of the popular RonAmok! blog. Ron shared his thoughts on his recent case study that evaluates Johnson & Johnson’s social media platform and how other pharmaceutical and medical device companies can integrate social media into their communications programs.
Here’s what he had to say…
What is it about Johnson & Johnson that makes them a good example for other healthcare industry companies to follow in implementing a social media program?
Johnson & Johnson had a vision that social media could work for them, but had to find a way to put a toe in the water. With their first blog, The Kilmer House, they chose to look backwards, focusing on their 123 years of public education. The choice to look backwards is brilliant because no one can get into trouble for backward-looking statements. By choosing something safe that fit within their corporate culture, J&J learned lessons and built upon that experience.
With compliance issues and medical companies under constant scrutiny for communication tactics (among other things), isn’t there a risk for companies to join in the conversation?
With healthcare you have to ask if what a company says online actually hurts the public. We started regulations to protect people from big-bad corporations, like the elixir salesman in the J&J case study. But what happens when such restrictions put a stranglehold on the conversation? I think the government is going to have to think through that question.
The other important thing to consider is that if they don’t figure out how to communicate online, patients will do it for them. If J&J doesn’t host the conversation about a particular disease or treatment option, people who are suffering from a disease state will collect together and talk about it–independent of pharmaceutical and device companies. For instance, PatientsLikeMe is a great place for people to discuss their ailments. A social network of like-minded people is totally different than talking with a company or a doctor, so people on PatientsLikeMe and other patient networks, like SugarStats, will probably share more information than the pharmaceutical companies ever dreamed of them sharing.
So do you think social media is the future for companies in healthcare communication?
It doesn’t matter, because the conversation is going to happen regardless. Companies and government regulators will have to figure out how to make it work, and if they don’t, the patients will. The tricky thing is that lawyers and regulators want absolutes–for everything to fit into black and white terms. Such a hope is impossible with conversation. Conversation is gray. The good news is that the issue will be solved. The question is: who will do it first?
Companies with the best chance of cracking it are those willing to take a little bit of risk. The risk being: we have decided to talk about this subject because we think there is a benefit for the greater good. When you look at companies like J&J, you see that healthcare companies keep inching closer and closer. As companies push the envelope further, some might get slapped, but maybe that will be the catalyst for change. For example, if a company creates a portal so valuable to patients, yet is removed because of some arcane regulation, the public uproar will force the regulations to change.
What are some basic steps a company looking to experiment with social media can take now?
Across industries, the most common obstacles include internal resistance and fear of losing control of your brand. Let’s face it. When you go online, you lose all control. The first step, then, is to explain this fact to upper management and gain their support.
Once you have support, I always recommend starting with a blog first. One of my top ten rules for social media is ‘don’t build an entire social media strategy on rented land.’ A blog on my website is mine. Twitter, Facebook and other social networks are great, but if you build your entire social media presence on external site and they go away, you’ve lost it all. With a blog, if one of the rented properties changes, your audience can trace the breadcrumbs back to your home—the blog. What I really like about J&J is that they built their foundation on their own land first and then built out with rented pieces. They started with two blogs, then went to YouTube, and now they’re using Twitter like a quarterback to tie all of the pieces together.
The other thing is to make sure you’re always measuring what you’re doing. With traditional media, we used to rent an audience from a publisher or a broadcaster, but social media allows us to build a specific audience of people interested in our products and services. To make sure that audience remains engaged, you have to measure its size and level of engagement to see what’s working, and what’s not. If your audience is growing and engaged and you still face internal resistance, show them the measurements. No one can argue with results.
In your J&J case study, you talk a lot about the impact of videos. Why do you think they are so effective, and what are best practices tips for companies looking to make videos?
Humans are very visual beings, so video is one of the quickest growing aspects online. To me, the success is in the stories and storytelling. We pay $10 to sit in a crowded movie theater with people we don’t even know to stare at a screen. Why? Because we’re hardwired to love stories. Therefore, creating online video that tells stories is an excellent way to communicate a message. Probably my favorite quote from C.C. Chapman is “the quality in it (video) is more important than the quality of it.” Companies must get more comfortable with the fact that we don’t need to spend thousands of dollars on a studio production. A lot of people think you need expensive studios and lighting to make a good online video, but to me that’s old media. As long as the sound and video aren’t distracting, the success comes from properly capturing the story.
In today’s Washington Post, Sandra Boodman evaluates whether online doctor rating systems, like RateMDs.com and Vitals.com, help or hurt the healthcare system. And more importantly, whether your doctor can prevent you from posting to one. Rating systems like TripAdvisor.com have become the go-to resource for booking your dream vacation, but physicians and advocacy groups argue that doctor rating systems don’t give people enough information on which to base their decision. Moreover, the information may not be completely accurate.
It used to be that to find a doctor, you would research the healthcare facilities in your area, talk to people you trust about their experiences, and interview the physician yourself to gauge whether the doctor would be a good fit for you. Sometimes this meant visiting a few doctors and getting a second or third opinion. But now, for some people rating systems might provide baseline information about a practice to help them get their research going.
While physicians argue about the validity of these rating sites, the real issue seems to be how do we select physicians today? And what role should physicians play in controlling that?
MSNBC put together a great article about the safety concerns of Parkour and freerunning. Parkour, for those who haven’t seen the YouTube videos, is the art of getting from point A to B as smoothly as possible, transversing benches, walls and garages in the urban environment. The popularity of these sports has grown wildly because of YouTube videos and Facebook pages and health officials are warning about the (obvious) dangers of jumping over park benches and swinging from trees.
Would you think twice about the safety of a sport that has been hyped through these channels? And, if you’re a traceur or traceuse, share your YouTube videos!
As a new generation of users come on the scene and popularity continues to spike, can we coax the healthcare industry into diving deeper with social media practices and leading the conversation?
By Dana
Last week, DiagnosisPR attended the Healthcare and Social Media Panel hosted by the Mass Technology Leadership Council (check out #MassTLC’s blog post recapping the event).Experts from all different walks of healthcare came together to provide tips for leveraging social media to positively impact patient and physician groups—a difficult endeavor, considering not only the compliance, transparency and ethics issues at stake, but also the broad array of constituents (and associated special interests) that need influencing in order to spur significant societal shifts.
The panelists pointed out that as we’re seeing across most next generation media channels, people are less concerned with having access to tomes of content, and rather seek out interaction and resources online. It makes sense, really: one-way communication and tightly packaged messages are fast becoming a thing of the past, especially in a field where consumers have a vested interest in cutting through any marketing haze to decipher what’s real versus what’s hype. In the realm of social media, Content is no longer king – Conversation is. Patients and physicians alike are becoming increasingly focused on making responsible diagnoses and healthcare choices, and the most direct avenue for achieving this is access to other human beings.
We’ve seen companies across the healthcare industry balk against adopting social media strategies for some time now, most recently in the form of drug companies reluctant to join the Twittersphere. What’s more, famous cases like that of the notorious Dr. Flea and the HIPAA crackdown could make some physicians skittish when it comes to joining the conversation.This broad-brush caution is reasonable, but risky at the same time: we learned from panel moderator Lynne Dunbrack that 60 million adults in the US are currently using social networking in some capacity.A marked spike in social media consumption among the middle-aged cohort is a promising sign for all those in the healthcare industry…Health 2.0 has a new face, and one that is itching for information and participation. In order for healthcare to positively impact this population and precipitate change, it is more vital than ever before to join these discussions and increase accessibility.
Check out some great strategies for leveraging social media for healthcare in this slideshow. Do you have any suggested strategies you’d like to share?
Larry Weber, Chairman of W2 Group, recently interviewed Charlie Baker, president and CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare and prolific blogger at Let’s Talk Healthcare on “Market Edge with Larry Weber” about the hesitancy of healthcare companies to engage in social media. While this topic has been discussed frequently in social media circles, it was great to hear Baker’s perspective on this, since he was one of the first healthcare executives to embrace social media and open a dialogue with the community through his blog. Baker spoke about the importance of removing the nameless-ness and faceless-ness out of the healthcare industry and learning from the community. Overall, he feels that the delay from the industry is the fear of giving up control and having people write negative comments on the site. While this is of course a concern, he urges other leaders to start the dialogue and thinks that it will soon pick up steam. The interview can be heard at: http://www2.webmasterradio.fm/market-edge/
What are your thoughts about the future of transparency and dialogue in the healthcare industry?
We as consumers have long since realized the power of the web in helping us educate ourselves on matters of our health. Whether it be the common cold, a pesky rash or the symptoms of swine flu, sites like WebMD having been helping us self-diagnosis for many years. But, with the rise in popularity of social networking, something interesting has taken hold in how the business side of healthcare leverages the web.
More and more, physicians and healthcare companies are turning online to interact, educate and inform. They now have, or can offer, unlimited access to the latest research, developments techniques and medical best practices. With anywhere, anytime access to this type of information, medical professionals across the world are now afforded the opportunity to learn in real-time, things that previously may have taken days, weeks, months or even years to reach them.
We’ve already seen sites like Doctor’s Channel, KevinMD and Science Roll become invaluable resources for medical professionals across the globe in essentially every field of medicine. And, healthcare organizations are also entering the fray, providing targeted sites to educate their constituents – consumers or professional – on the latest developments on certain disease states. Take a recent site from one of our clients geared at educating global infertility specialists on the best techniques for improving pregnancy rates, or the site Patients Like Me, which unites patients from across the world, in a ongoing research experiment to help shape future treatments and therapies for conditions like ALS, MS and Parkinson’s.
The web is having a tremendous impact on how everyone consumes and shares medical information. It will be interesting to see how this medium continues to impact healthcare for us the patient and how much physicians truly embrace these online tools.
According to the 2009 Deloitte Survey of Healthcare Consumers, more than half (55 percent) of consumers would like to communicate with their doctor via email, and 57 percent would like to schedule appointments, buying prescriptions and completing other transactions.
Many consumers are already technologically plugged into their health. During the annual Health 2.0 – 1x conference here in Boston last week, Kaiser Permanente, a nonprofit health care system, announced that more than 3 million of its members are using MyHealthManager, their personal health record database which allows members to manage their healthcare online, including e-mailing physicians or changing or canceling appointments.
I would absolutely prefer to manage prescriptions or reschedule appoints via email. In fact, I have an outstanding call I need to return to my dentist who needed to last minute reschedule my appointment. I would have rescheduled by now if he had emailed me for sure.
What are your thoughts? As medicine moves deeper in the interactive, digital space, will it change the way you communicate with your PCP?
At this point, we’ve all heard of Twitter in the office, at the gym, and even on the movie set, but the latest Twitter scene is sure to surprise even the most avid tweeters. Good Morning America (GMA) recently revealed a trend toward tweeting from the OR – that’s right, hospitals across the country are embracing social networking as an ME tool, citing the value of Twitter in reaching a new generation of tech-savvy medical students and residents. According to GMA, more than 100 hospitals currently have Twitter accounts, and speculators agree that the number will increase significantly over the next several months as more physicians and hospitals strive to keep up with the Jones’.
For an industry historically known for its resistance to technology, this is a pretty big feat. Twitter only recently gained national attention, as well-known personalities like Oprah, Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears announced their active presence on the site. As “average joe’s” tried to understand the benefits and inner workings of this uncharted territory, some of the most prestigious medical centers quickly recognized a valuable role for Twitter in their medical educational efforts, and incorporated the technology into their everyday practice.
Mayo Clinic, for example, prides itself on its position as one of the first centers to truly embrace social media, eventually hiring a full-time employee solely dedicated to social media. Mayo has even developed a “tweet camp,” designed to bring MDs and nurses up to speed on Twitter. And a physician with Aurora Healthcare just recently provided live updates via Twitter during a knee-replacement surgery, in hopes of both educating physicians on the technique and alleviating any patient fears on joint-replacement surgery.
Naturally, this unforeseen adoption begs the question – are hospitals truly using Twitter and other social networking sites for educational purposes, or is there at least a small element of brand marketing in that strategy? With a competitive marketplace out there, hospitals would be smart to leverage new technologies to help create stronger brand awareness and defined differentiators. But I do believe that at the end of the day, physicians are genuinely looking to better patient care and improve efficiencies, and Twitter is just one of the latest and greatest to help make that happen.
