Sparking Innovation in South Carolina

I’m in Charletson today for the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) 16th Annual Healthcare Leadership conference, during which I will be part of a panel called “Employing Social Media to Build Customer Satisfaction & Community Outreach.” Our moderator is Jessica Munday and my fellow panelist is Elissa Nauful.

The conference theme is Sparking Innovation, so I’m glad to be able to share our Mayo Clinic experience with social media. Here are my slides:

Note that all of the links in the presentation above are clickable and will take you to the referenced resources.

For those wanting to get more involved, here are three helpful next steps:

  1. Create your free Guest account in our Mayo Clinic Social Media Health Network.
  2. Explore some of the free curriculum offerings (listed in bold or italic)
  3. If you’d like to join with us in Bringing the Social Media Revolution to Health Care, check out the membership options.

I welcome your comments or questions below.

HCSM Review #32: Patient Empowerment Edition

The HCSM Review is a peer-reviewed blog carnival for everyone interested in health care social media, and I’m glad to be moderating the 32nd edition. This time we’re focusing on the ways technology is improving the lives of patients, and how patients are taking advantage of social tools to improve their own lives.

Leading off, we have an essay contest through the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media for patients and caregivers to win scholarships to attend Social Media Week at Mayo Clinic. We published the first batch of the essays and opened the voting on Monday. So as not to play favorites, here’s the link to the page where all of the essays are featured. Check them out and cast your votes.

Some other posts you might find interesting:

Brian McGowan will be hosting HCSM Review #33.

HCSM Review #32 Call for Submissions: Patient Empowerment Edition

SMUG is again hosting the Health Care Social Media Review, the blog carnival focused on health care social media, curating some of the latest stories, research and resources shared by colleagues.

Because the financial cost of blogging and using social networking platforms is typically zero (or close to it), and because these tools enable people overcome barriers of time and space and to make connections, they have great potential to help patients find their voice. In Issue 32 of the HCSM Review, we’re looking for great stories of how patients are taking advantage of social tools to gain knowledge and find support.

Health Care Social Media Review

To submit your post:

Email a link to your post or posts (no more than two submissions per author) by  6 p.m. EDT on July 15.

Format your submission email as follows:

  • Email Subject Line: HealthCare SocialMedia Review
  • Blog Title:
  • Blog URL:
  • Post Headline:
  • Permanent link to post:
  • Your Name: Name, Username, Nickname, or Pseudonym
  • Description or brief excerpt:

You also may submit your entry online at Blog Carnival HQ. Learn more about the HCSM Review by visiting HealthWorks Collective or follow @healthworkscollectiv on Twitter.

We look forward to your posts!

American Medical News highlights hospital social media

American Medical News has a nice profile this morning of Dana Lewis, who exemplifies the new role, in an article titled “Hospitals’ new specialist: Social media manager.” The article begins:

For otolaryngologist Douglas Backous, MD, Twitter and blogging were “like speaking a foreign language.” So he went to his hospital and got himself a translator: Dana Lewis, hired by Seattle’s Swedish Medical Center to handle all things social media.

Lewis is part of a trend in a new and growing type of hospital employment: the social media manager.

Technically, she’s called the interactive marketing specialist. But she, and others like her, are being charged by their hospitals to handle such duties as overseeing their social media presence, communicating with patients through social media — and, in many cases, teaching affiliated or employed physicians how to use social media. The idea is that by having a person dedicated to social media, the hospital can use the technology to strengthen its connections with all of what organizations like to call their stakeholders, which include the physicians who refer patients through their doors.

Check out the whole article: Ed Bennett’s Hospital Social Networking List also is featured, as are my 35 Theses here on SMUG. It also has a nice compilation of social media best practices for hospitals, which author Bob Cook apparently synthesized from several guidelines documents.

Here’s more information on what we’re doing at Mayo Clinic, with our new Center for Social Media. I’m excited that we’ve hired candidates for four of the eight new positions with the Center, and that we have interviews this week and next for two more. I’m also honored that both Ed and Dana are on our advisory board (with 12 more members still to be named). We’re going through about 120 applications from some really strong candidates to ensure broad-based and diverse membership.

When the official online publication of the American Medical Association devotes an extensive article to the topic of social media staffing for hospitals, that’s a good sign the activity is going mainstream. We’re glad to contributing to that through the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media and the Social Media Health Network.

Twitter Case Study: Finding GPS in a Hospital Haystack

I was in a meeting today with Kim from our Mayo Clinic Quality office discussing how social media and tools like the Flip video camera could be used in her work, and she mentioned that she had heard about a hospital in Texas that was giving GPS units to patients when they checked in, so they could more easily navigate to their appointments.

She said she had been wanting to track down the name of that hospital so she could get in touch and learn from the experience to see whether it’s something we might want to try, but that she didn’t really know where to start looking. So she had procrastinated for a few months at least because, as David Allen says in Getting Things Done, if you don’t know what the next action is, you can never move projects forward to completion.

I asked Kim if she would like to try a little Twitter experiment, right then and there, with me putting out the call for the information on Twitter. She was game, so here was my tweet at 2:27 p.m. today:

leetweetforgps

Within seven minutes my message had been re-tweeted five times, including these:

someretweets

…and I also had several other responses telling me about RFID options and a pilot program that puts GPS devices in the shoes of Alzheimer’s patients to help track them if they go wandering.

By 2:39, 12 minutes after my original tweet, I had what I think is likely the definitive answer:

gps-answer

But besides the answer I was seeking, having asked the question on Twitter led to some new alternatives that I think Kim hadn’t been considering.

Lessons and Observations:

  1. Using relevant hashtags is a great way to have your tweet go to people beyond those who follow you directly. In this case I used #hcsm and #hcmktg. I’ve participated more in the former than the latter, but knowing about them enabled me to ask a relevant question in a virtual space where like-minded people gather.
  2. Investing time in Twitter builds capacity for future efficiency. The fact that I was familiar with Twitter, had some followers and knew some appropriate hashtags meant that I could find out in 12 minutes what had stymied Kim for several months. It’s possible that a new Twitter user with a question like that would get an answer, but likely only if a vendor had a Twitter search term set for “GPS.” Twitter isn’t a quick fix; it’s built on relationships. That takes some time, but once you’ve put in some effort you will see that the community will come to your aid.
  3. With Twitter, I didn’t have to know where to start looking, or who to ask. I asked my tweeps, and some of them passed it along to their tweeps. With email I would have had to decide where to send the message. With Twitter the message just seems to find the right people, provided you have started by putting in a little time to start a network.

Thanks to @stephaniethum, @nanoni127, @shamsha, @BethHarte, @JohnSalmonHUP, @josullivan, @lwelchman, @Cascadia, @lisacrymes, @DaphneLeigh, @DynamicRFID, @NickDawson, @tstitt, @mkhendricks, @MikaLofton, @mkmackey, @ljstarnes, and @gelogenic for participating today!

That’s the power of Twitter: 18 people coming together with no notice to discuss a topic and get an answer to a perplexing question (and to suggest other interesting alternatives) in less than an hour.