With huge growth in 2009, social media is not just a passing trend used by online marketers; it’s a real, effective method of communicating ideas, sharing information and connecting with people across all age and socioeconomic groups. Healthcare, while slower to adopt the social media wave than other industries, is coming to realize the potential social media tools provide to develop connections with patients, potential patients, along with other physicians and healthcare leaders around the world.
What are some of the driving forces behind this explosion in popularity? One reason is that as consumers, we’re no longer trusting of advertising and we don’t want to be marketed to, we want to be engaged, build a relationship, make the company earn our trust and hear our friends or family’s review of their experiences. In fact, studies show that today, only 14% of people trust advertising, whereas 78% of people trust recommendations and referrals. Companies are using social media outlets to build relationships, trust and encourage recommendations and referrals from their engaged consumer base. As practice, hospital and physician growth are so strongly correlated to patient referral and recommendation volumes, it is only natural healthcare organizations look to social media outlets to continue to foster patient relationships and increase referral volumes.
As of February 2010, where is the healthcare industry in its adoption of this social media explosion? Larger organizations and health systems are utilizing the power to connect, share and engage their patients. While, on average, smaller private physician groups and individual physician offices are still slightly hesitant and dipping their toes in the social media pool cautiously. One can understand why healthcare professionals do need to take a more strategic approach to interacting and engaging patients online with potential HIPAA privacy issues and other challenges looming. However, with a carefully crafted social media strategy, many health organizations are realizing the benefits of becoming more accessible in their marketing and reaching out to inform, educate and build trust with patients. According to Ed Bennett (edbennet.org) hospitals are currently at a 53% adoption rate, with 336 Facebook pages, 430 Twitter Accounts, 254 YouTube Channels and 70 blogs. In total, 557 health systems are reported to be participating in some capacity with social media, with the term “social media” encapsulating many forms and tools, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, LinkedIn, Flickr, and a number of patient forums.
How are healthcare organizations using these tools effectively? Let’s focus on the top three tools currently adopted and being utilized in the healthcare social media sector.
Facebook: Physician practices and health systems alike are using Facebook as a dynamic, community-based website. It has become a place where physicians and leaders can post timely, organic or professional videos to educate patients and also connect on a more personal level. As a valuable resource for health information sharing, many organizations are taking the embarrassment out of sensitive subject matter and addressing specific medical problems, questions and issues for patients. Also, introductions to staff members and tours of the facilities are assisting organizations with connecting with their patients outside the four walls of their office and building rapport before patients even arrive for their appointment. Practices are also encouraging patients to participate and engage on their site through discussions and contests. Private practitioners are more likely to start their social media strategy with just a Facebook Fan Page, while larger health systems and hospitals are embracing other social media tools in combination with Facebook in their initial strategy.
Twitter: Twitter is being adopted quickly by the larger health systems as a way to share information, publicize events like health screenings, fairs and clinics and also connect with other health organizations. I like to think of it as a public relations channel for these hospital and health systems. What’s great is that in short, 140 character or less “tweets”, these organizations are sharing a wealth of information to their patients and those patients are finding ways to access this health information and the system like never before. Overall the smaller, private practitioners are not as quick to adopt Twitter as they are a practice website or even Facebook, but many are starting to realize the benefits of utilizing this community as a way to share their expertise and knowledge, along with driving traffic to their websites.
YouTube: Healthcare organizations are using YouTube like their own, private television station that can be shared with millions of viewers across the world. Again, more popular amongst the larger health organizations, videos of procedures, interviews with clinicians, tours of new facilities and patient testimonials are being posted in a searchable, user-friendly manner to continue to enhance brand awareness, build trust and gain patient loyalty. This social media tool can be used much like Facebook, easing patient fears and answering tough or embarrassing questions. It can also give patients a visual insight into the facility so they know what to expect before arriving at an appointment or for a procedure. It can act as an online referral source, highlighting patients that have had outstanding experiences and are recommending that organization to over a billion of their closest friends and family online. YouTube is the second largest search engine and healthcare professionals are quickly utilizing its power to share and connect with patients.
The fact of the matter is that for all industries, including healthcare, social media is both a curse and a blessing. Patients, who are now consumers with choices, can post content and interact freely with their physicians and their hospitals, sharing both outstanding experiences and negative experiences. Many health professionals are worried about their vulnerability, but social media is real life, online. As 2010 progresses, you’ll be seeing more and more attention placed on social media by healthcare professionals and by the end of the year, it will be a necessity for organizations to be participating and engaging online, or be left out.
For those organizations still looking to test the waters, my best advice is to develop a clear and concise plan for your online activity. Think about your goals, who are you trying to reach and where are those patients connecting online? What resources do you have to allocate to this new marketing initiative? Will you keep your efforts “in-house” or look to a firm to help with the process? Who will manage this strategy once it has been developed? What legal implications must we bear in mind as we move forward to protect our patients’ privacy? These are some of the questions that must be asked before ever jumping into the real-life world of social media. Remember, your patients want to feel engaged and interact with you; they are not looking to be marketed to, promoted to, or sold to. They want real information that can assist them in making important health decisions, while getting to know you and why you care about them as a patient. Use social media tools as a way to connect with your patients outside your office and build lasting relationships, keeping you on the top of their mind. When you can make those types of connections with your patients and build loyalty, your organization will begin to see social media as an effective way to increase your referral and recommendation volumes.
Thanks to guest author Jamie Verkamp, Director, Growth and Development of (e)Merge whose tagline is “Helping Medical Practices Grow”. She can be reached by phone (816)326.8464 – OFFICE, (816)565.1657 – CELL, (816)474.0595 – FAX and can be reached electronically email | web | twitter | facebook.
A loved one was recently hospitalized for surgery in a nearby town. During the experience there were several moments when I had to decide whether or not I would say something to nurses about hand washing and cleanliness. To my great surprise, I was too intimidated to say anything! The one time I did speak up went something like this:
• Hey, is that nurse filling my loved one’s water pitcher?
• She’s trying to make the water not too cold or hot, that’s good.
• Oh, no, she is letting the water run over her hands and into the pitcher! Should I say something?
• She’s probably going to dump out that water and fill it up with water her hands haven’t been in.
• Nope, she’s turning off the water. Do I say something?
• Me: “Hey, that water ran over your hands!”
• Nurse: “Don’t worry, I wash my hands all the time.”
• Me: “No, I don’t think we should take that chance.”
• Nurse: ‘I’m really hurt that you would think I’d do something like that.”
This was a personal seminal moment. I could not believe that after working with physicians and nurses in healthcare for 25 years that I would be intimidated about saying something about cleanliness. I was worried about the potential impact that my questioning would have on the care of my loved one. That made me hesitate about saying something until a situation came up where I could not keep quiet. I could not suppress my concern based on the possible impact to my loved one.
What about the nurse’s reaction? It was defensive, and she was telling me in essence “I can’t believe you’d question my decision-making.” In discussing the situation later with my husband (not the patient), he assured me that I had done the right thing. He asked me if I saw the waiter in a restaurant washing his hands at my table, would I then let him dip his hands in my soup?
This hospital experience was 99% wonderful. I thought the hospital paid excellent attention to the needs of the patient and the family. I thought it was clean, the caregivers were very good, and I would recommend the hospital. But the wall is still up about questioning at this hospital and probably every hospital across the US. It is a hard call to tell the professionals that they are doing something wrong. A cleanliness episode can happen so fast that you don’t have time to debate yourself about saying something.
How can we make it okay to question caregivers for the benefit of the patient?
The Medical Home, also called the Patient-Centered Medical Home, and the Personal Medical Home, is a movement to solve the problem of fragmented care (one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing) by having a primary care physician or practitioner act as the center of all care information for the patient. Fragmented care is dangerous (lack of coordination of care causes mistakes and mistreatments), costly (repetition of diagnostic tests and regimens), and wasteful of healthcare resources. The Medical Home plan goals are to provide care for all individuals, improve care, and decrease healthcare costs.
“Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century” was published in 2001 by the Institute of Medicine. In this landmark book, the patient’s role and responsibility for navigating the healthcare system and acting as the information hub around which the spokes of primary, specialty and tertiary care providers revolve was denounced (more…)
An article authored by Kurt Cagle, online editor for O’Reilly Media, does a great job exploring telework which he defines as
…employees and contract workers performing their work out of the office – from home, from distributed work centers, from coffee-shops, indeed, from wherever those workers may happen to be at the time.
Probably the job most commonly performed off site for medical practices is transcription, with billing a close second. More recently I’ve heard of triage nurses and registrars teleworking and if you think about it, any job that can currently be filled by outsourcing (appointment reminders, appointment scheduling, switchboard, etc.) could be performed by your own employees offsite.
If you’re like me, you may have considered teleworkers for your practice, but worried about managing off site employees and keeping them bonded to the team. Cagle discusses the ever-growing list of technologies available to stay connected, but does not underestimate other problems historically associated with telework.
Telework requires a certain degree of self-starting and responsibility. Ironically, a number of studies, including one performed by Sun in 2007 showed that one of the older stereotypes of teleworkers as people who would tend to do a little work then skip to some other activity, watch TV or surf the web actually proved to be something of a myth – for the most part most teleworkers actually tend to put in longer days working than they would in the office …
Other benefits of teleworking for employees:
- Savings on gas, parking and wardrobe
- Ability to self-schedule
- Gain personal time eliminating commute
- Customized workspace for each person: temperature, light, sound
- Reduction of the carbon footprint
Other benefits of teleworking for employers:
- Saves on expensive medical office square footage
- Fewer distractions could increase productivity
- Allows practice to grow without physical expansion
- Expands employee pool – employees can live anywhere
- Reduction of the carbon footprint
What have you done for your career lately? Are you comfortable in your current job? Are you happy? Happy with your income? Happy with your level of challenge? What would you do if you lost your job tomorrow?
Do yourself a favor and invest a little time in your future.
At WordCamp recently, Lorelle VonFossen said “You need to think about having a digital presence.”
I suggest that signing up with LinkedIn (free) and building your online presence is a good start. LinkedIn could be called the business version of FaceBook although many people use FaceBook as their business networking tool. The general consensus is that for business LinkedIn is probably the most-used (25 million people) and best-known of the social networking websites. Social networking uses the theory that we’re all connected to each other through those we know and that every other person on the Earth is connected by six other people, thus the term you’ve heard “six degrees of separation.” You use these connections to network and meet people, ask and answer questions, and possibly, find jobs.
There’s a lot to completing your LinkedIn online profile, but you don’t have to do at all at one time. I think my LinkedIn profile is about 75% complete and I’ve been working on it for a couple of months. Take your time, do it right, then start to look into joining some LinkedIn groups to see what people are talking about. The trick is not to get hundreds of people in your network (unless you’re a recruiter), but to build authentic relationships with people you think well of.
If you’re not sure what social networking can do for you, check out these articles:
Jobseekers are Beginning to Favor Social Networking Over Online Career Sites to Find Jobs
Now for something a little bit different for my Monday morning resource post. I came across two recently published studies that I found interesting – both about people tapping into the Internet for health information.
It doesn’t seem that long ago (it wasn’t!) that I first heard of people bringing information from the Internet in to discuss with their physician. If I remember correctly, the general feeling among the docs was “Why are patients looking for information when I can give them everything they need to know?” Wow, good question. Today, it seems natural to me that patients seek information on the Internet. I think it is fairly well-accepted that a patient who looks for information on the Internet is more likely to become engaged in their own health and an engaged patient is generally a better, and healthier patient.
The question I have is “What does an Internet-savvy patient population mean for my practice?” A wonderful, difficult, scary question. Think about this while you peruse the startling statistics below, and maybe link to the full stories to read more.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project released information last week on what percentage of online Americans are seeking medical information online.
- 68% of online men look online for health info
- 81% of online women
- 76% of white internet users
- 65% of African-American internet users
- 71% of English-speaking Hispanic internet users
- 68% of 18-29 year-old internet users
- 78% of 30-49s
- 76% of 50-64s
- 71% of internet users age 65+
And in a related article, The Center for Studying Health System Change released information last month on sources (other than doctors) that people get their health information. The bottom line is:
- Internet = 32% of the total population
- Magazines and Newspaper = 32% of the total population
- Friends and Family = 31% of the total population
Interestingly, TV and radio ranked quite low, which anyone watching the weekday morning shows can tell you – TV seems to report the health news, and all news, pretty much last.
My practice spends about $9,000 a year going to the bank. That’s what it costs for the time it takes for one person to open the envelopes, separate the checks from the EOBs, add the check totals, stamp the backs of the checks, copy/scan the checks, write the deposit slip and go to the bank on a daily basis.
Now my practice is evaluating one old option and one relatively new option. The lockbox has been around for a long time, but as technology has become more sophisticated and less expensive, and time has become more valuable, the lockbox has seemingly become more affordable. Evaluating it now, it seems like a great deal to have someone else perform all the steps listed above as well as having the check and EOB images stored online for easy access.
The newer option is the check reader that scans and uploads the check image to your bank, depositing a group of checks in the bank from the comfort of your own office. BusinessWeek had a good overview of this technology in a video recently. Click the link below to see the video.
High-Tech Banking
if you’re spending too much money depositing your money, maybe you should call your banker.
My daughter has a big crush on Billy Mays and loves his products, but even she should draw the line at buying health insurance from him.
BusinessWeek’s recent article by Karyn McCormack includes the pitchmeister Mays’ endorsement of the iCan health insurance product, touted as “affordable” and “not some discount card.”
Someone advised me a long time ago that health insurance should be like car insurance. You buy it for the big stuff, not for maintenance, dings and scratches. Because the iCan plan that starts at $160 per month doesn’t have very rich benefits, the article notes that:
If you end up with a large medical bill, members of iCan’s health plans have a health advocate to negotiate pricing and hospital charges, says Harold Shatz, managing member of iCan Benefit Group in Boca Raton, Fla. A $40,000 to $50,000 medical bill can be reduced to $10,000 to $12,000 through network pricing and use of a health advocate to examine the bills and find errors, he says.
Jaded as I am, even I am dumbfounded by this offer for value-added service! Read the entire Story Here.
When we first moved to the west coast, I was stunned to find that people routinely take two weeks of vacation off AT ONE TIME! On the east coast, my experience had been that taking more than a week off was reserved for getting married or going to Europe. Amazingly, and this was a revelation to me, people can take two weeks off at a time and the organization can go on! Now I am very much in favor of people taking longer vacations for a number of reasons:
- It forces the organization to cross-train employees and to make sure that there are at least three people in the company that know how to do every critical task.
- It requires the creation and maintenance of current, clearly written protocols associated with each job, in case the other two employees who are cross-trained on the job get sick, have jury duty, have a death in their family, or quit on short notice.
- It gives the company an opportunity to assess the workload and composition of a job from another person’s viewpoint. We’ve all had the experience where someone goes on an extended leave and you find out that the job is much more, or less, complex that you thought, or someone was telling you.
- It ensures that nothing untoward is going on with someone who has access to company money. Everyone’s heard of the manager who never takes a vacation, not because s/he’s so dedicated, but because s/he has sticky fingers.
- It gives the employee an opportunity to truly rest, heal, and remember that there is life outside of work (can you tell I’m thinking about myself here?)
Here’s an excellent article that has some great points about the ethics of taking Vacations. The author, Bruce Weinstein, PhD states:
Leaving work behind for a period of time is not only acceptable; it is our ethical obligation.
My advice to each of you is to fulfill your ethical duty as soon as possible.
NOTE: This post won’t make a bit of sense unless I tell you that my blog used to be called “healthpromeme.” A bunch of people told me they didn’t get it and couldn’t remember it, so I changed it!
A number of people have asked about the name of this blog. My mother wrote to me and said she needed filled in on this “meme” thing. Wikipedia defines meme (rhymes with “seem”) this way:
A meme consists of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods. Memes propagate themselves and can move through a “culture” in a manner similar to the behavior of a virus. As a unit of cultural evolution, a meme in some ways resembles a gene. Richard Dawkins, in his book The Selfish Gene, recounts how and why he coined the term meme to describe how one might extend Darwinian principles to explain the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. He gave as examples tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothing-fashions, and the technology of building arches. – Wikipedia
When I was considering names for this blog, I was looking for something catchy, similar to Geeks Are Sexy, a favorite site of mine, or Execupundit, another favorite. After deciding on lots of excellent names, and finding none of them were names that were actually for sale, my son suggested healthpromeme, to describe the field I’m in and indicate some sort of hip factor. If you’re my age, you need your children to clue you in to things, and if you’re like me, you also need them to clue you in to when it’s time to stop saying stuff that isn’t hip anymore. It seems like I just got the hang of saying “jiggy with it” when my kids told me to stop it.
I hope you have kids to tell you when to stop it too.
