Patient Voice in Health Care

Today I’m participating in an event for patients, family members and health care professionals at Mayo Clinic in Rochester. It’s called “The Voice of the Patient in Harmony with Care: Safety Through Patient and Provider Partnerships.” My presentation, which I’m giving at 9:30 a.m. and 12:45 p.m., is entitled, “The Internet and Partnership Communication Opportunities of the Future.”

I’m embedding the slides from my presentation here, and including some key links below. I would appreciate any comments, questions or other feedback from the participants, and of course if any want to become SMUGgles, you’re completely welcome.


Here is our Mayo Clinic Podcasts blog, including the posts on POTS and Niemann-Pick Disease Type C.
Here is our Mayo Clinic page in Facebook, and the Organ Transplant group, as well as the Mayo Clinic-sponsored CarePages service.

Here is our Mayo Clinic YouTube channel, as well as one of the patient story videos from Rhonda King.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFYiaMuZY4g]

This is the link, I believe, to the Long QT group on Yahoo that she mentioned.

Those who want to learn more about social media can enroll in SMUG, or just start with the Core Courses or the Facebook curriculum.

Please feel free to engage here in the comments, and discuss how these powerful tools could help meet important communication needs in the patient/provider relationship.

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Video and Audio Podcasting in Healthcare

On Thursday I will have the pleasure of participating in a webinar sponsored by Health Resources Online, called “How Healthcare Organizations Are Using Video and Audio Podcasting To Engage the Community, Drive Loyalty and Facilitate Patient Education.”

Kind of a catchy title, huh?

I will be discussing our Mayo Clinic experience, particularly in podcasting and web video. My fellow presenters will be Elizabeth Tracey from Johns Hopkins and Dr. Grayson Wheatley, a cardiovascular surgeon from Arizona Heart Institute and CVMD.org.

I look forward to hearing what Elizabeth and Dr. Wheatley have to share. You can get more information or register for the webinar here.

Talking Social Media and Health Care at MSP

I have a three-hour layover at MSP, so I’m taking advantage of the time to have a chat with Albert Maruggi for a talk he’s giving to the Mississippi Hospital Association in a month or so.

He’s going to be shooting some video; hopefully he will upload it to YouTube so I can embed it here.

It’s a good thing we’re both in our 40s, which explains why we would both have time to talk about this kind of stuff on a Friday night.

Facebook 303: Career Fairs and Recruitment

Today I had the pleasure of participating in a Mayo Clinic Health Care Career Festival, as part of our Public Affairs/Media Support Services booth.

We had about 700 high school students from across southern Minnesota attending the day-long event, where they got to participate in some classes and also meet people who work for Mayo Clinic in various capacities.

This is a great application for a Facebook group. In our booth, we had eight laptops connected to the Web and with the Mayo Clinic Health Care Career Festival Alumni group set as a “Favorite.” Students could log in to their Facebook and join the group, so they can go back and see the photos and videos we’ve uploaded, including photos of them. (Note: we obtained parent permission and had release forms signed for students to participate.)

Here’s one of those photos that shows our booth:

Health Care Career Festival Booth
Health Care Career Festival Booth

We’ve uploaded photos and videos from the day to the group, and the students will be able to go back to it and tag themselves, or otherwise interact with each other and with Mayo staff. It also will provide our Human Resources and Education colleagues an opportunity to share updates on internships or course offerings with students who have expressed interest by attending.

As of this writing we have 335 members in the group. Some of them are Mayo staff, but most are students. We also have 7 videos and 136 photos.

If you have any kind of event that involves primarily high school or college students, you definitely could use a group like this to engage participants and to stay in contact with them.

Key Elements for Success

Choose a platform participants are already using. For high school students, Facebook is it. If you have to get people to join the networking site and then join your group, you’ve created a two-step process that’s too complicated. At our event today it took less than a minute for students to join the group.

Have a way for participants to sign up while they’re in your booth. Having the laptops with Internet access right there, so all they had to do was sign in to Facebook and join the group, made it easy. I guarantee that if we would have given them a flyer with the URL we wouldn’t have had 10 percent join the group. As it was, we had about 300 sign up in the first few hours.

Give them a reason to return. For today, having the photos and videos of them (and links to some of our Mayo Clinic social media sites like our Mayo Clinic YouTube Channel, News Blog and Facebook Fan Page was novelty enough. Hopefully they’ll go back to the group when they’re at home, and will tag themselves in photos and videos and will invite friends to join the group. It will be up to our HR team that sponsored the event to continue to make the group interesting and relevant to the students in the longer term.

What do you think of this application of social media in career recruiting? What other ideas do you have for applying Facebook?

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Social Media 203: YouTube Video Annotations

Annotations are a great new beta feature available on YouTube. They enable you to add text to your videos, and to have that text linked to a specific action on YouTube. I first saw this in some of the BarelyPolitical videos, and thought perhaps this was a premium feature.

It turns out it’s available to all of us.

For an example, I decided to use a video we did yesterday about the first large study of breast cancer detection using molecular breast imaging as an alternative — or at least as a supplement — to mammography. It turns out that molecular breast imaging found about three times as many cancers as mammography in this group of women. You can read more about the study here on the Mayo Clinic News Blog, and we also have links to some photos and resulting news coverage.

Here’s the screencast of me adding the annotations last night, which also shows how you can add annotations to your videos:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc3RY1UEaQQ]

And if you want to see the finished product (and perhaps even subscribe to the Mayo Clinic YouTube channel), here it is:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve0FT9s3fXc]

The only real drawback from the publisher’s perspective is that the annotations can’t be linked to a non-YouTube URL. It would have been nice to be able to link directly to the blog post where the video is embedded, so viewers can get more information. But I’m fine with that, since I could add the link in the video description field.

From my perspective, the major advantage of YouTube annotations is that they offer a standardized way to add descriptive text, such as Dr. Hruska’s title, without requiring either expensive studio-grade video editing software or a lot of time and effort. The annotations are plain, but they also are crisp and functional. It takes only a minute or two to add these annotations. And if this is the standard on YouTube, anyone who uses it can have confidence that it will be seen as consistent with how Web video is done.

What do you think?

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