INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT RESEARCH AND ...

May 2012/ Volume 2/Issue 5/Article No-17/792-799

ISSN: 2249-7196

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT RESEARCH AND REVIEW HEALTHCARE SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY: USING SOCIAL MEDIA TO IMPROVE HEALTHCARE HEALTHCARE BUSINESS INSIGHTS ON CURRENT PRACTICE AND FUTURE PROMISE Praveen Pillai*1 1

Research Scholar, NationalSchoolofLeadership, Pune, India.

ABSTRACT Imagine the year 2004 when Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his college dormitory. The thought that people might someday spend over 700 billion minutes per month on a single website such as Facebook was unthinkable. Now social networks represent a brave new world for healthcare. Using social media tools has become an effective way to expand reach, foster engagement, and increase access to credible, science‐based health messages. In other words, integrating social media into health communication campaigns and activities allows health communicators to leverage social dynamics and networks to encourage participation, conversation, and community – all of which can help spread key messages and influence health decision making. Social media also helps to reach people when, where, and how they want to receive health messages; it improves the availability of content and may influence satisfaction and trust in the health messages delivered. Likewise, tapping into personal networks and presenting information in multiple formats, spaces, and sources helps to make messages more credible and effective. This paper examines the growing use of social media networking in the health care industry, and provides unique proposition to explore the potential of social media as a tool to advance a more responsive, patient-centered healthcare system. Finally the paper examines the ways in which social media are currently being used in healthcare and possibilities for future innovations and how their use might be further developed in the future. INTRODUCTION Social media refers broadly to collaborative and interactive online communication and community-building tools, that allow individuals to communicate quickly, easily, and broadly. Current popular social media sites include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube; in addition, millions of individuals publish their thoughts and interests through blogs. The days are gone when mass communication belonged to mainstream print, television, and radio companies. “Take Two Aspirin and Tweet Me in the Morning”.This is howDr Jay Parkinson and many other techno savvy physicians’usesocial media for interacting with their patients.

*Corresponding Author

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Dr. Jay Parkinson, the Brooklyn-based primary care physician who has been referred as the “The Doctor of the Future” and one of the “Top Ten Most Creative People in Healthcare” formed “Hello Health” – the paperless, concierge practicethat deploys web-based secure social media network and electronic medical record enabling doctors to communicate, document, and transact with their patients in person and online via email, IM, and video chat, twitter, facebook etc. Welcome to the world of SOCIAL HEALTHCARE Social networking on the internet are empowering, engaging, and educating health care consumers and providers. While consumers use social networks like personal blogging, wikis, video-sharing, and other formats — for emotional support, they also heavily rely on them to manage health conditions.

Healthcare and social media - Growing Use in Healthcare Can you really shop for by-pass surgery the way you shop for a tie? Will the successful pharma practice of direct to consumer marketing work in other forms of healthcare? How can healthcare delivery practitioners prepare for consumer-driven selection? Marketers, advertisers, and PR professionals across the spectrum of healthcare will be impacted by these questions as social media threat and opportunities come to healthcare. Social media have revolutionized the healthcare industry and is quickly becoming the preferred resource for individuals seeking healthcare information. Patients turn to social Copyright © 2012 Published by IJMRR. All rights reserved

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networking groups to find others who are battling the same diseases (for patients preparing for the same type of surgery, following the tweets helps demystify the process and ideally reduces anxiety about upcoming operations.), share advice, recommend doctors, even sending other members a virtual hug, while clinicians connect to share information and learn from each other. Hospitals all over the world are using social mediaas a marketing and communications tool to educate, publicize, entertain and otherwise trying to establish themselves as the go-to place for customers in need. With a Face book fan page, patients are regularly updated on the day to day developments, while a YouTube account are used to upload educational videos, similarly Twitter account is used to link to the latest press releases or the use of educational blogs about specific ailments. It’s even further used for scheduling appointments, appointment reminders, practice updates, or public health notifications. Some organizations use social media to promote wellness and sponsor online support forums where individuals who are dealing with chronic health issues or catastrophic conditions can find support from others who are having similar experiences. Many organizations use social media to encourage philanthropy. By publicizing their services, promoting patient advocacy, displaying credentials, and describing the tangible and intangible community benefits they provide, organizations can encourage benefactors to invest in their mission. Some healthcare organizations are beginning to recognize the potential impact of leveraging social media channels to complement recruitment and training efforts. They advertise their available positions and also search social media sites to determine the integrity and trustworthiness of potential hires.

Healthcare Marketing – The Social Way As with all businesses, medical practices face stiff competition and budgetary constraints and must differentiate themselves by portraying value and quality to their prospective clients. With the increasing cost of healthcare and a growing number of available hospitals as options, more than ever, it’s essential for hospitals and health providers to rethink their healthcare marketing mix to include social media. Given the statistics on healthcare consumers growing reliance on the internet, it should come as no surprise that physicians are beginning to adopt social media. Beyond communicating with patients and potential patients, a number of physicians are using online resources and social networks to collaborate with colleagues, to research potential diagnoses for patients Copyright © 2012 Published by IJMRR. All rights reserved

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and to enhance their medical knowledge.Social media has emerged as a powerful and effective tool for hospitals and healthcare organizations to stay on top of patients’ mind and maintain contact and relationships with other medical professionals, patients, and the general public. The network effectof social media can cause “word of mouth” epidemics unlike anything that caregivers have ever seen before. Social media are just the way word of mouth happens in the 21st century.It’snothing more than word-of-mouth extended into the electronic world. Hospitals and Healthcare units are realizing that word-of-mouth is the most significant driver to influence patients and so social media offers an opportunity to humanize what can be a scary, complex situation. One of the most famous health-care facilities globally, the 118-year-old Mayo Clinic, is using social media tactics right from its inception. When Dr. Will Mayo and Dr. Charles Mayo built Mayo Clinic through collaboration with the Sisters of St. Francis, it was relatively unusual for patients to survive a hospital stay. Quite often they succumbed not to the underlying ailment but to an infection resulting from surgery. The Mayo brothers and the Franciscan sisters pioneered aseptic surgical techniques which meant that many more patients lived to tell their stories. And when they went home, they spread the word about their experience. According to Lee Aase, Mayo Clinic's Manager of syndication and social media – “Word of mouth has been a crucial part of building Mayo's brand for more than a hundred year. People come to Mayo, have a good experience, go home and tell others about it. We see social media as the 21st Century version of word of mouth. We're talking to the whole world, potentially." It is also important for the healthcare industry to have a sizable online presence to ensure that consumers aren’t misled by faulty information, like for Mayo clinic’s it all started initially & partlyto keep others from “squatting” on the name and posing as Mayo Clinic. Although a majority of marketers have embraced online social media and user-generated content efforts, the rise in social networking and health-care blogging has sparked a nascent movement to set standards and guidelines that include conflicts-of-interest disclosure and privacy protection for "open media" in health care. The challenge with social media is to take advantage of the opportunity without crossing any important professional and legal boundaries. American Medical Association created a policy about professionalism in the use of social media. Its guidelines include: maintaining standards of confidentiality; using privacy settings to safeguard personal information; and maintaining appropriate boundaries of the patient-physician relationship. In addition, the guidelines suggest that physicians bring any perceived unprofessional content on behalf of their colleagues to their attention and, if the colleagues do not take action, to bring the matter to the appropriate authorities. Lastly, the guidelines advise physicians that their actions online may negatively affect their reputations and medical career.

Copyright © 2012 Published by IJMRR. All rights reserved

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Developing a Social Media Strategy Hospitals, clinics and pharmaceutical companies need effective social media strategies to thrive in this age. The most challenging part of implementing a successful social media campaign is pulling in the relevant audience. Like in any other website, social media is driven by content. A social media communication strategy should be only one part of a larger communication effort, and social media needs to be integrated into overall communication planning, activities and data collection. Therefore, over arching communication goals should be considered when developing social media activities. As with all media outreach, the keys to effective social media outreach are identifying target audience(s), determining objective(s), knowing outlet(s) and deciding on the amount of resources (time and effort) that can be invested. Social media more information can be obtained through a particular media channel to help build your strategy. For example, with social media you can listen to conversations in real time, and identify influencers and fans. You can better understand audience needs in specific social media spaces and engage users in new ways. Policy Development Social media has become an undeniable force, and its rapid, informal communication style represents both possibility and liability for healthcare organizations. Good policies and training help organizations pursue the benefits and mitigate the risks. Social media can also be effectively used to raise awareness about healthcare issues and be used to promote a healthy lifestyle, provided a proper policy is in place to monitor its development and implementation. Policies help establish an organization's rules and expectations around social media. Some healthcare organizations find that they can simply modify existing policies to specifically address social media. Legal counsel should contribute their expertise or guidance in creating written policies. Policies surrounding social media should address the following issues, at minimum: •

Who can access social media from the organization's network

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Activation of network settings that allow only designated staff to access social media (e.g., marketing staff) to help protect privacy and confidentiality

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Inappropriate uses of social media, either on the organization's network or a personal device (e.g., disparaging and defaming the employer, divulging trade secrets and other proprietary information, or violation of privacy rights)

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Ramifications for inappropriate use, which should relate to existing company policy stating a violation can and may lead to discipline, up to and including termination

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Responsibility of employees that witness inappropriate use

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Modification of other policies related to codes of conduct, disciplinary action, handbooks, e-media use, discrimination, or harassment


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•

Ensuring that staff members understand and acknowledge that they are not speaking on behalf of the organization when they post on their personal social media sites

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Responsibility of employees outside the realm of their employment (e.g., their actions on social media may put them at risk for civil liability)

CONCLUSION For marketers in any industry—from manufacturing to real estate to banking, and everything in between—making the business case for social media is very imperative. Corporations globally, from Starbucks to Dell, are using social media to reach customers, although hospitals have always been conservative in marketing to patients. But there is a growing number of healthcare organizations leveraging social media as more than a marketing and communications tool. They embrace social media as an "innovation catalyst" and deploy more collaborative models that foster broader engagement and knowledge sharing among patients, providers and trusted institutions. While the industry has taken a giant leap forward into the brave new social media world, but the reality is we've only scratched the surface of what is yet to come. An inherent problem with the “buzz” from social media is that there is no way to rank their importance, and so they tend to be handled first‐in‐first‐out, if at all. But the biggest mistake hospitals make is confusing social media with one-way communication tools. Some hospitals have hundreds or thousands of people signed up to follow them on Twitter but only follow back a handful. Or they use Facebook to push out press releases and other information about their organization and to drive traffic back to their own Web site without showing any interest in what others are talking about. Any advertising that encourages increased resource use and increases the costs of care is inherently in conflict with ethical medical care but social media offers an effective way of promoting your business and supporting any existing marketing activities at no extra cost. But Social Media should always be a complementary part of marketing mix. In order for a hospital to be effective at Facebook or Twitter, someone needs to be there at all times to respond. But also there’s no one-size-fits-all answer for social media. Not every social media approach is appropriate for every hospital or health care organization. One need to find the right mix that works, more importantly, figuring out how to communicate therapeutically during social media interactions. Just because a hospital is on Facebook doesn't mean that they are building a meaningful Facebook experience for both the hospital and the patient. Whether you are looking to increase patient traffic to your office, enhance your reputation in the community, or just want to supplement your other marketing efforts, in order to realize the maximum benefit from social media marketing, it is important to strike a balance between excitement for the potential it holds as a marketing and information gathering resources versus the potential risks the medium represents given the public nature of the much of the information that is being shared in these online communities. People may say bad things about the facility—true or not—that can damage its reputation. At the same time, people may


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say very good things that can promote the facility. Learning to highlight the positives and manage the negatives is imperative for any organization embarking on social media. It's even more challenging is tomeasure the ROI from Social Media initiatives. While real relationships are a valuable way to measure your social media ROI, measuring the success of a new marketing campaign should include the number of eyeballs, shakes and finger swipes, the number of blogs, articles, tweets and digs, the number of conversions, calls, responsesand recommendations. Social media has become an undeniable force, and its rapid, informal communication style represents both possibility and liability for healthcare organizations. Good policies and training help organizations pursue the benefits and mitigate the risks. Social media, if designed well, managed correctly, and supported by the system, could optimize both patient and provider experiences. But patients and providers need to live together in this space (and be supported by the system) to ensure social media is a cure and not a CURSE. REFERENCE AMA Weighs in on Social Media. Health Data Management. January 1, 2011. Available online at www.healthdatamanagement.com/issues/19_1/ama-weighs-in-on-social-media41631-1.html. Patrick B, Meehan S. The One Thing You Must Get Right When Building a Brand. Harvard Business Review 88, no. 12 (December 2010): 80–84. Dimick, Chris. Privacy Policies for Social Media. Journal of AHIMA, January 6, 2010. Web exclusive. Available online at http://journal.ahima.org/2010/01/06/social-media-policies. Edelman, David. Branding in the Digital Age: You're Spending Your Money in All the Wrong Places. Harvard Business Review 2010; 12: 62–69. Gaines-Ross, Leslie. Reputation Warfare. Harvard Business Review 2010; 88: 70–76. ID Experts. Avoid the Risks of Anti-Social Networking. Data Breach Examiner 7 (Nov. 2010). Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media. http://socialmedia.mayoclinic.org. Spenner, Patrick. Why You Need a New-Media 'Ringmaster. Harvard Business Review 88, no. 12 (Dec. 2010): 78–79. Wolf, Dale. Making Social Media Work for Business. Expert Access. September 8, 2010. Available online at http://expertaccess.cincom.com/2010/09/making-social-media-work-forbusiness. Government Social Media’s Web 2.0 Governance Policies and Best Practices Wiki: http://govsocmed.pbworks.com/Web‐2‐0‐Governance‐Policies‐and‐Best‐Practices SocialMediaGovernance.com’s Online http://socialmediagovernance.com/policies.php.

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Pew Internet and American Life Project: http://www.pewinternet.org/ Copyright © 2012 Published by IJMRR. All rights reserved

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CDC eHealth Data Briefs: http://www.cdc.gov/HealthMarketing/ehm/databriefs/ Paton C, Bamidis P, Eysenbach G, Hansen M, Cabrer M. Five Case Studies of Social Media Use in Medical and Health Education. IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics 2011 (in press). Eysenbach G. Medicine 2.0: social networking, collaboration, participation, apomediation, and openness. Journal of Medical Internet Research. 2008;10(3). Giustini D. How Web 2.0 is changing medicine. British Medical Journal. 2006;333(7582):1283. Kamel Boulos MN, Wheeler S. The emerging Web 2.0 social software: an enabling suite of sociable technologies in health and health care education. Health Information & Libraries Journal. 2007;24(1):2-23. Bamidis P, Constantinidis S, Kaldoudi E, Maglaveras N, Pappas C. The use of Web 2.0 in teaching Medical Informatics to postgraduate medical students: first experiences. Published as Multimedia Appendix in: Eysenbach G. Medicine. 2008;2:1022-23. Hansen M, Oosthuizen G, Windsor J, Doherty I, Greig S, McHardy K, McCann L. Enhancement of Medical Interns' Levels of Clinical Skills Competence and Self-Confidence Levels via Video iPods: Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial. Journal of Medical Internet Research. 2011 (Mar 01); 13(1):e29 Maag M. Podcasting and MP3 players: Emerging education technologies. Computers Informatics Nursing. 2006;24(1):9. Sandars J, Homer M, Pell G, Crocker T. Web 2.0 and social software: the medical student way of elearning. Medical Teacher. 2010;1-5.


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