Health Care and Social Media
October 9th, 2009
The health care industry has been a bit “late to the game” when it comes to social media. However, this week at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, approximately 100 health care communications professionals came together to explore strategies for catching up.
At an event hosted by Ragan Communications, speakers from Mayo Clinic , Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Operation Smile , Kaiser Permanente and others all came to share their experience jumping into the world. Each of us are exploring the opportunities that social media presents to us as communicators, while at the same time balancing the regulations within a fairly conservative industry. Concerns about protecting patient privacy and overcoming cultures that too often fear transparency were significant challenges for all.
It was great to hear from the organizations who are proactively exploring all that the Web 2.0 world has to offer. And I am glad I was able to share Kaiser Permanente’s journey with my friend and colleague, Dr. Ted Eytan by my side.
As Ted and I have shared here on Disruptive Women before, Kaiser Permanente was shocked into the world of social media. However, in the past couple of years, it has become central to all our public relations efforts. By coupling social media with other outreach strategies, we have built solid relationships with influentials throughout the industry who we often discover are speaking about us, without our involvement.
When we entered the social media space, we did so with the recognition that we had obligation to tell our story. What we didn’t understand at the time was that the more we told our story, the more others would come to understand it and begin to re-tell it for us. While it remains critical that we continue to proactively share our story, we now understand that the voices of those independent third-parties — our members, our employees, other influentials — re-telling it will always be more powerful.
Related posts:
- March Man-of-the Month: Dr. Ted Eytan Interviews Holly Potter, Kaiser Permanente’s VP for Public Relations, on the Use of Social Media in Health Care
- FDA Gets Social: Considers Regulating Social Media for Drugs and Devices
- Drug & Food Safety in the Age of Social Media and Transparency
- The NHMA Forum on Health Care Reform offers an opportunity to impact health reform legislation
October 9th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Twitter Comment
Health Care and Social Media
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October 11th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Thanks for including Disruptive Women in your presentation (I work for Amplify)! It’s interesting to compare this to J.D. Kleinke’s reactions to the Health 2.0 conference from The Health Care Blog. Seems like it’s easier to bring new technologies into external communications than into communicating with patients/members:
(a) fewer, more interested people to talk to (rather than everyone whose employer picked a particular insurance company);
(b) simpler, less networked relationships (for example, look at slide 15, where patients have so many incoming streams of information); and
(c) much more information available from peer organizations that have incorporated social media into their public relations.
Good luck continuing down this path – one of social media’s opportunities is improving customer service, so hopefully that will become more and more the case in healthcare.