Hospital Twitter Chat List

[ratings]

Kelley O’Brien (@kelleyob) from North Carolina posed the following question via a tweet this afternoon:

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A. I’m not aware of anything like a comprehensive list of hospital Twitter chats. Ed Bennett’s Hospital Social Networking List is a great resource to tell us which hospitals have social media presence, and he even has some great hospital Twitter lists by state, but the list doesn’t include specific projects (such as surgical cases being “tweeted” that have been undertaken by hospitals or healthcare organizations.

But the great thing about social media is that you can build a list pretty quickly by crowdsourcing…via Twitter.

Or at least I think we can. Let’s see!

I’m listing below some of the Twitter chats/events I’ve been involved with through Mayo Clinic, along with some others I’m aware of that others have done.

It’s not even close to exhaustive. But that’s where you come in. If you know of hospitals that have done Twitter events, whether it was related to a surgical procedure, or a communications crisis, or promoting research findings, or whatever other ways you’ve used Twitter (or seen it used) in a hospital setting, please tell about it in the comments below.

Please include the name of the hospital, its Twitter handle, a relevant link to a post, news release or news story describing the effort, and any description you would like to add. Also please indicate which category (listed in bold below) is appropriate. And if you think I’m missing a category that should be added, please tell me that, too.

You also can share your examples via Twitter, using the #HospitalTweets tag. But by adding them in the comments below, they’ll be more permanent (since Twitter doesn’t archive tweets)…and of course, you’re not limited to 140 characters.

I will update this post based on your contributions to create a more comprehensive list.

Let’s see how quickly we can come up with a really good list!

Surgical Case Tweeting

Research Communications

Crisis Communications

Presentations and Training:

  • At @MayoClinic, we have held three Tweetcamps to provide training for staff. Here’s a post that describes Tweetcamp III.
  • When I do presentations, I regularly include a Twitter back-channel, such as this training seminar on social media I did yesterday with local advocacy chapters of American Heart Association. This is a good way for participants to get hands-on experience with Twitter.

Mainstream Media Collaboration

What other examples can you add?

Case Study: Text Messaging from the Operating Room

At the Healthcare Internet Conference in Las Vegas earlier this month, I got to hear about some innovative projects being implemented by other hospitals and systems. One of these was shared by Owen DeWitt of Las Colinas Medical Center in Irving, Texas.

Owen is Director of Marketing for this hospital, and he wanted to be able to provide text message updates to family members waiting for information about a loved one having surgery. In the video below, he describes how he went about getting the system established, using a freelance programmer:

This seems like a really nice service, and I like the way he went about getting it set up. I think sometimes internal IT staff get an undeserved bad rap as being obstructionist or foot-draggers, but in reality they need to focus on the institution’s priorities. A text message update system is a “nice to do” but things like the electronic medical record (and the payroll system) are essential activities.

So it makes a lot of sense to hire a freelancer to work on these extra projects, and the Las Colinas group should be commended for understanding that and enabling Owen and his team to work with outsiders to provide this service to patients and their families.

Twitter Health Care Case Study: Angie Anania

At our #MayoRagan09 health care social media summit yesterday, Angie Anania from HealthONE Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Medical Center in Denver told her story of using Twitter relating to a surgical procedure, and the collaboration she did with the local CBS affiliate. I asked if she would be willing to share her experience more broadly, so here it is, compliments of the Flip:

I think her point about collaborating with local media in a win-win application of social media tools makes lots of sense. What do you think? What other examples of this have you seen?