One in Five Gathering Health Info Using Social Media

Posted by: Meghan Blackford // May 10th, 2011

One in Five Gathering Health Info Using Social Media

While Facebook may not touch WebMD’s usefulness as a source of health information, according to new research from Ticker, an astounding 94 percent of responders to a recent survey indicated that they’ve used the big blue social network to gather health-related information. In fact, according to Ticker, social media in general is used for one in five Americans for the same purpose! Not only to readers trust this information, but what they read impacts their health care decisions. Ticker reports that one in four found that social media was very likely or likely to impact their future health care decisions.

@MJBlackford

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Three Ways Hospitals Can Blog Better

Posted by: Neil James // May 9th, 2011

Three Ways Hospitals Can Blog Better

“Uhhhhh…..” thinks the paralyzed healthcare marketer, overwhelmed by the daunting weight of an empty WordPress page. Ideas for hospital blog topics that once flowed like a mighty river have slowed to a trickle. You get up for a cup of coffee, chat with co-worker about your weekend and return to your desk. When you get back, an e-mail requiring your attention gives you an excuse to put off blog maintenance for yet another day – thank goodness!

If this sounds like you, you might be interested in a new article by Nancy Cawley Jean for Hospital Impact, The Art of Hospital Blogging. Jean describes three ways that hospitals are blogging successfully. Among the highlights, Jean discusses how the Mayo Clinic uses their blog to secure media placements when more traditional PR fails and how hospitals like Children’s Hospital Boston and the University of Maryland Medical Center excel at telling their patients’ stories.

@NeilAndrewJames

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UbiCare’s EQ Chart Benchmarks Facebook Engagement for Hospitals

Posted by: Neil James // May 3rd, 2011

UbiCare EQ Chart Benchmarks Facebook Engagement for Hospitals

Your hospital’s CEO asks how your social media program is going. You say it’s great – your hospital has 500 Facebook fans and get 10 comments a week. Your CEO asks “is that good?” You pause for a second before inevitably responding “well, yeah,” quietly hoping your CEO doesn’t ask you to justify your assessment.

Now, thanks to Boston-based Ubicare’s Engagement Quotient (EQ) Chart, as discussed in a new article for Healthcare IT News, you can have something more substantive to justify your healthcare social media program’s existence. The EQ Chart tracks the activity of over 900 healthcare-specific Facebook pages and measures interaction and engagement, synthesizes the data and provides industry benchmarks. The EQ chart also provides a thoughtful review of trends in hospital Facebook usage, including that pages with the highest engagement average two posts per day and that “likes” outpace “comments” by nearly an eight to one ratio!

@NeilAndrewJames

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The Streisand Effect for Healthcare Marketers

Posted by: Neil James // May 2nd, 2011

The Streisand Effect for Healthcare Marketers

The Streisand Effect is defined by Wikipedia as “(an) online phenomenon in which an attempt to hide or remove a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely.” The term originated from Streisand’s $50 million suit against a photographer designed to remove an aerial photograph of her mansion from a publicly available collection. As a result of the suit, public knowledge of the picture increased substantially, incurring over 400,000 views in the month following the suit.

Brett Pollard discusses how an occurrence of the Streisand Effect in the healthcare industry in his article for Alert Presence, A Physician Review Gone Wrong. Pollard outlines how a doctor sued an individual who posted a negative review on a physician review site. News of the suit spread first to the local news, then to the heavily trafficked Reddit community which receives one million visits per day. A user in the Reddit community suggested that everybody post negative reviews of this doctor to whatever site they could. Pollard counted ninety-nine negative online reviews posted after the lawsuit.

Hindsight of course being 20/20, the physician’s lawsuit, regardless of outcome, clearly had the opposite of its intended effect. While obviously an extreme scenario, this story serves as a reminder that healthcare marketers should have a grasp of community dynamics so as to minimize the risk of engaging in a way that can make a bad situation worse.

@NeilAndrewJames

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Social Media’s Positive Impact on Clinical Trials

Posted by: Neil James // April 28th, 2011

Social Media's Positive Impact on Clinical Trials

As the $4 generics from Target and Walmart clearly demonstrate, it’s not the actual process of manufacturing and production that makes medicine so expensive – it’s the research. Pharmaceutical research is among the most rigorous known to man, and for good reason! The costs incurred by not conducting extended critical trials are life-threatening.

Unfortunately, though a necessary evil, clinical trials are very expensive. It is this expense, however, that has prompted researchers to explore whether social media can reduce the cost of conducting research while maintaining quality – a topic dicussed by Amy Dockser Marcus in an article for the Wall Street Journal, ALS Study Shows Social Media’s Value as Research Tool. Marcus discusses how researchers tapped the 4,300 strong PatientsLikeMe ALS community to evaluate the impact of a lithium-based treatment regimen. While not as rigorous as a full-blown clinical trial would have been, researchers were still able to gain significant insight into the drug’s effectiveness at far less cost.

@NeilAndrewJames

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Patients With Rare Diseases Using Facebook, Social Media For Peer Support

Posted by: Neil James // April 25th, 2011

Patients With Rare Diseases Using Facebook, Social Media For Peer Support

When you have a disease that affects only five in one million, your network for peer support will naturally be limited. One of the most truly transforming effects of the web and social media on healthcare has been its ability to facilitate connections between those afflicted by rare diseases. Nancy Shute recently discussed this phenomenon in a new article for NPR, Web Communities Help Patients With Rare Disease. Shute describes how Facebook helped connect a Spanish-speaking individual from New Jersey who was recently diagnosed with lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM), one of the world’s rarest diseases, with another Spanish-speaking LAM sufferer in St. Louis. Beyond peer support, Shute also discusses how the web has positively impacted medical research by facilitating the growth communities of those suffering from rare diseases. Members of these communities are frequently “expert patients” and among the most willing to volunteer for clinical trials.

@NeilAndrewJames

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C+C Healthcare Social Media Factory: Pump Up the Engagement

Posted by: Neil James // April 18th, 2011

C+C Healthcare Social Media Factory Pump Up the Engagement

Many hospitals, clinics and health networks are running successful social media programs without making people sweat till they bleed. Mike Morrison, in a new article for Hospital Impact, identifies C & C – content and culture – as critical components of these programs’ success! Morrison urges healthcare marketers to reflect on the types of content their organization is best suited to produce. If you don’t have the capacity to make more than two videos a year, Morrison notes, YouTube might not be the best vehicle. Similarly, Morrison implores healthcare marketers to understand the cultures of various social networks – Facebook, Twitter, online forums – and identify which ones most closely match the culture of their clinic.

@NeilAndrewJames

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Healthcare Social Media Marketers, Remember Spiderman’s Lesson

Posted by: Neil James // April 15th, 2011

Healthcare Social Media Marketers Remember Spidermans Lessons

If you weren’t a comic book fan, you might not be aware of Spiderman’s eternal credo: “with great power comes great responsibility.”After all, it was Spiderman’s indifference to his power that indirectly led to the murder of his father-figure, Uncle Ben. What does this have to do with social media and healthcare? Lee Aase expounds upon this topic in an article for the Mayo Clinic, Social Media: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. Social media tools allow hospitals to speak instantly to their followers and evangelists with nothing more than a few keystrokes. This ease, this power, Aase asserts, requires great responsibility and critical judgment, as even the slightest lapse in judgment can result in significant consequences. To support his case, Aase cites recent cases where poor judgment in social media resulted in the dismissal of court cases and the accidental revealing of critical information regarding a wounded police officer.

@NeilAndrewJames

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Don’t Look to Big Conglomerates for Healthcare Social Media Strategy

Posted by: Neil James // April 12th, 2011

Dont Look to Big Conglomerates For Healthcare Social Media Strategy

Fewer one in five hospitals are using Facebook, and most of those that do use it simply as a vehicle for broadcasting PR. Because the focus is on broadcasting news, reach, or fans and followers in the context of social media, becomes the only metric for success. This is a mistake according to a new report, chronicled by Adam Gaub in a new article, Hospital’s Facebook Focus Should Be Engagement, Not Fan Totals. According to a new paper published by UbiCare, small local hospitals, which comprise the majority of clinics in the United States, are much better equipped than their larger counterparts to offer localized content and resources via social media, which ultimately can yield better engagement and a deeper relationship with the community.

@NeilAndrewJames

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