Social media use in healthcare is growing allowing hospital healthcare professionals to build personal connections with patients, their families and other doctors worldwide. Through the use of social media in hospitals it allows patients to have better informed doctors with access to life saving tools, improves patient centered care and communication among staff, facilitates networking and attracts visitors to the hospital’s website.
Hospitals promoting the use of Social Media for their Doctors and Healthcare Professionals
There are now 1,565 hospitals using some combination of social media networks, according to the Health Care Social Media List, managed by the Mayo Clinic’s Center for Social Media. Doctors and healthcare professionals are using social media to raise awareness, educate and engage with patients and other doctors in the healthcare community. Social networks like Twitter, Doximity, Facebook, and YouTube are being used by doctors and healthcare workers to connect outside the exam room. These “connected physicians” are leveraging Twitter as part of their daily job to track disease trends, and using Facebook to share links, articles, identify medical problems and even for ideas on performing life saving surgeries (West D., 2012). In 2010, it was noted in a study done by doctors at The Cleveland Clinic, that twenty-one percent of healthcare professionals at hospitals used social media in their jobs for patient interaction, promoting hospital success stories and as ways of sharing medical information including surgical procedures to the world audience (Thaker et al, 2011).
Social Media Empowers Healthcare Workers
Social media empowers users by allowing them to communicate effectively and have access to all kinds of information. In healthcare, patients increasingly use social media to communicate and share information. Patients share their stories and information on social media, which are rapidly indexed by search engines like Google and can be found easily. Seeing that many patients start by performing a Google search, it seems relevant for hospital organizations to be active on social media. For example, 64% of all respondents of an online questionnaire among patients in the United States start by performing a search to analyze their condition. Another reason why hospital organizations should embrace social media is that it may contribute to quality improvements in health care. Active use of social media not only speeds up communication and improves information provision for patients; it allows caregivers to engage patients in the delivery of care, and for caregivers and patients to make decisions collaboratively and improve their relationship. In this way, using social media improves patient-centered care (Van de Belt TH, Berben SA, Samsom M, Engelen LJ, Schoonhoven L., 2012).
There are also beneficial aspects for the hospital organization itself. Several studies reported that social media can improve communication among staff, facilitate networking, attract visitors to the hospital’s website, build the hospital’s brand, and be used for recruitment for research projects (Van de Belt TH, Berben SA, Samsom M, Engelen LJ, Schoonhoven L., 2012).
Doctors Saving Lives
"Doximity, a professional social networking site specifically designed for doctors, may help physicians save lives," LinkedIn co-founder Konstantin Guericke tells CNBC. The fifth most common cause of death is doctor error, which can come from miscommunication among doctors. With Doximity, doctors are better connected with people in their industry and can collaborate to improve treatment and save lives (Thompson, C., 2012).
Doximity addresses privacy concerns by allowing doctors to share information via the website or mobile app with HIPPA compliant encrypted messages. So far, there are over 700,000 physicians in the United States signed up for Doximity (Thompson, C., 2012).
Best Practices for Healthcare Professionals and Protecting a Patient's Privacy
Surely there are so many positive attributes that social media has to offer hospitals but healthcare professionals also need to address the privacy aspect. With social media, once a picture or statement is posted it's no longer private and anyone has access to it. As stated by Michelle Duff of The Press "The Medical Council is advising doctors to bone up on social media protocol, as the increasing number of medical professionals using cites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn gives rise to privacy dilemmas" (Duff, 2010). We located several hospital Facebook pages. A few of note are: The Mayo Clinic, Boston Children's Hospital and The Cleveland Clinic. There is a disclaimer link noted on the Boston Children's Hospital Facebook page that they ask people to read before posting anything. Daulton West stated that "best practices for healthcare professionals to avoid would be not to blog about specific cases, or reveal any customer data; do not offer medical advice or any remedy that would require a doctor visit first; “Engage and educate” don’t diagnose; and share something of value such as recommending other sites, article, links, tools, and tips" (West, D., 2012). He continued to state: “One-third of consumers now use social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and online forums for health-care related matters, including seeking medical information, tracking and sharing symptoms, and broadcasting how they feel about doctors, drugs, treatments, medical devices and health plans" (West, D., 2012). Social media is here to stay and it’s changing the nature of healthcare interaction. Hospitals, healthcare organizations and medical professionals that choose to ignore this virtual environment may be missing opportunities to engage patients (West, D., 2012).
Hospital Social Media Guidelines
In the last four years, most hospitals have developed and enforced social media policies. The full Mayo clinic social media policy is available online. The guidelines are very clear and thorough. In the article: Five Tips to Guide Your Hospital's Social Media Policy, it discusses the four step process that hospitals should take when crafting a social media policy. Danbury Hospital in CT is another hospital that has a solid social media policy. Vanderbilt University Medical Center has an online "social media toolkit." There are so many resources online to teach hospitals how to build and enforce their social media guidelines that it's easy to understand how most hospitals have developed clear social media guidelines.
Tools To Empower Patients
Another member of the health system who preaches the e-health gospel is Dr. Daniel “Danny” Sands, Director of Medical Informatics at Cisco Systems, the networking equipment giant, and a practicing physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. Deaconess was another early electronic healthcare adopter (EHR), and Dr. Sands was instrumental in developing Deaconess’s current patient portal, Patientsite.org. In 1998 Dr. Sands coauthored the first paper to establish guidelines for using electronic communication tools in clinical patient care. Using social media in healthcare “is about changing the locus of control to the patient” and altering the relationships between care givers and care receivers (Sands D., 1998). In this view, patient portals, EHR platforms, blogs, video chat, and “tweets” won’t merely substitute for many one-on-one encounters with providers, but will also allow for richer engagement and deeper doctor-patient relationships (Hawn, C. 2009).
Social Media in Healthcare: Leading the Way for Exciting Life Saving Procedures
Through our thoughtful research, we determined that so many healthcare establishments have adopted the use of social media and have benefitted tremendously by its use. Whether it be better patient-centered care or communication among staff, social media definitely is a key tool that's paving the way for doctors to be able to access colleagues from all over the globe and perform life-saving surgeries. The widespread adoption of social media use in healthcare opens the door to so many exciting changes for the healthcare community, patients, their families and other doctors worldwide. Through the use of social media in hospitals it allows patients to have better informed doctors with access to life-saving tools, improves patient centered care and communication among staff, facilitates networking and attracts visitors to the hospital’s website.
With all the education being offered as well as all the documentation that hospitals have online, it makes social media policies easily understood by doctors and other healthcare workers. The use of social media in the hospitals and sharing of information by doctors and healthcare professionals worldwide paves the way for access to exciting life saving procedures in the healthcare arena.
References
Conaboy, C. (20 April 2011). For doctors, social media a tricky case. Retrieved from boston.com.www.boston.com/lifestyle/health/articles/2011/04/20for_doctors_social_media_a_tricky_case/?page=2
Duff, M. (2013, Aug 22). Hospital staff misuse social media. The Press Retrieved from http://ezproxy.snhu.edu/login/url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1426609259/accountid=3783
Hawn, C. (2009) Take Two Aspirin And Tweet Me In The Morning: How Twitter, Facebook, And Other Social Media Are Reshaping Health Care doi: 10.1377/hlthaff.28.2.361 Health Aff March/April 2009 vol. 28 no. 2 361-368
Sherman M. (29 May 2012) Making Social Media Work Within HIPPA Guidelines Retrieved from http://www.dreamgrow.com/making-social-media-communication-work-within-hippa-guidelines/
Thaker S, Nowacki A, Mehta, N.B., & Edwards, A.R. (2011). How U.S. Hospitals Use Social Media. Annals of Internal Medicine, 154(10), 707-708. (Scholarly Research)
Thompson, Cadie (5 Jul 2012) Doctors' Social Network Can Help Save Lives: LinkedIn Co-Founder, CNBC.com
