Hospital Twitter Chat List

Surgical Case Tweeting
I (@civiletti) tweeted my own laparoscopic cholecystectomy at Peconic Bay Medical Center in Riverhead (L.I.) New York on May 4. It was the first procedure in the Medical Center’s brand new surgical pavilion. The tweeting was taken over by the hospital CEO while I was being operated on. I took over the tweeting again as soon as the anesthesia wore off. We posted a video of the surgery on You Tube, narrated by the surgeon, Dr. Tino Cervone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDRlfsdi8-c

At the time, I was the executive editor at the community newspaper group here (timesreview.com). I wrote a column about what I was doing and why in advance of the surgery (http://civiletti.blogspot.com/2009_04_19_archive.html), blogged from the recovery room (http://civiletti.blogspot.com/2009/05/im-in-recovery-area-after-gall-bladder.html), wrote another column, post-op, about the experience (http://civiletti.blogspot.com/2009/05/when-your-comfort-zone-goes-hi-tech.html) and we posted the video on the newspapers’ website, where it got more views than any other video we’d posted to date.

I have since become the VP for external affairs at the hospital, where the first order of business is a complete overhaul of its antiquated, clunky website. There will be more twittered surgical cases to come!

Scripps Health (@ScrippsHealth) in San Diego, CA held a Wellness Day (www.wellnessday.org) in October at six Scripps Health locations. We did a retweet contest on Twitter leading up to the event, and on the day of had both employees and attendees live tweeting the seminars and activities.

Category: Presentations or Events (not listed)

Thanks to all who have shared so far. We haven’t tweeted operations at Mayo Clinic, but I’m sure the same HIPAA form we use for interviews would be appropriate for this, too. As for the “China Syndrome” case, I think the main thing is to have a plan in place in advance, such as to say, “We need to halt this chat temporarily, and will be back with an update when we are able.” Something like that. Probably could be worded better. But as I said, we have had cameras in the OR, but haven’t live tweeted yet.

We are still getting our feet wet with Twitter here @uvahealthnews, but we recently used it when the Charlottesville area got a most unusual 2 feet of snow over a Friday night/Saturday. The roads were impassable in some areas, and while many employees spent the night and worked extra, we still had hundreds of weekend employees who had to get to work. We used Twitter to put out a call for volunteer drivers with 4-wheel drive and the local TV stations and newspaper, who follow our feed, re-tweeted it. To the best of my knowledge, it only resulted in one volunteer coming forward, but better than none.

Also, a Christmas tradition here is for Santa to fly in on our medevac helicopter, Pegasus, and give gifts to patients in the Children’s Hospital. We gave a Pegasus manager cell phone access to our account, and he tweeted Santa’s arrival.

I would love to get more into it and tweet new procedures and surgeries. One issue I’ve run into is that Twitter seems to only allow one cell phone number connected to each account, so only one person can post updates from their phone. Does anyone know a way to get around this?

This past September we tweeted during an EGD procedure undergone by one of our employees. We used it as an educational opportunity, and to see what kind of response or interaction we might get. Though we did not actively engage with any followers during the procedure, we did attract good local media attention to our social media efforts. Since then we have shared the “Twittercast” opportunity with several clinical departments, but so far we have not scheduled any other events.

Last August our hospital began tweeting ER wait times. We promoted the service primarily on outdoor boards and cable TV advertising. We are the first hospital in the St. Louis market to post our ER wait times. This strategy not only provided people with real-time, relevant information, it created a lot of buzz in the community. Now, if it’s 10pm and a mother is wondering where she can bring her child with an earache, she knows how long to expect to wait. For any true emergencies, the wait time doesn’t apply since they are seen immediately anyway. Check it out at twitter.com/progresswester.

Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center has used Twitter as one component of a multi-layered project with Playing by Air Productions, a local juggling and entertainment troupe founded by a recently minted PhD from our bioinformatics program, Jacob Weiss. The project combines social media and juggling to share cancer prevention and early detection messaging. You can view the videos at http://www.catchitearly.org (they are also on YouTube). Jacob tweets under the handle @catchitearly and I often RT as @manleyatvicc.

The previous examples really demonstrate how social media is the antithesis of something that can be controlled or manipulated. It’s basically anarchic. Because of that the availability of social media is as valuable inside the walls of the organization as outside. In our organization there are probably 500 or more users who are twittering about a wide variety of organizational issues and maybe 3 are formally endorsed and run by marketing. The rest are all done ad hoc by individual nurses, physicians and other staff. They range from the mundane (planning and executing a nursing ward baby-shower) to semi formal (physician led group participation in community event).
The learning is this social media has empowered everyone in the organization and this has democratized and improved the day-to-day interaction between individuals across normal role boundaries.
The downside is the horses have left the barn and it’s impossible to manage or exert any semblance of message control anymore. Those that don’t lead by messaging are those that are victims of the message.