With the rise of social media, patients are more informed than ever before and coupling that with the federal government’s push for electronic medical records, the power of health care is shifting to the individual, argued MedTouch Chairman and CEO Paul Griffiths during this week’s New England Society for Healthcare Communications Spring Symposium.
Individual hospitals or doctor’s offices will be quickly trending away from keeping paper records while larger organizations will look to fill the electronic void in collecting and storing health data for patients — data that they can choose with whom to share it with.
Though this takes away the ability of the provider to be a silo for each patient’s data, it should increase efficiency tremendously at a time when an increasing shortage of primary care physicians and other health care providers is burdening the system.
“Hospitals are [generally] not ready for the customer’s ability to collect data, but doctors are,” Griffiths said. (read more…)
Paying homage to Revolutionary War hero Paul Revere, Stephen Moegling, Franklin Street Marketing senior vice president of client services, says that today’s health care marketers need to be a connector to both supporters and detractors, old school and new school, and patients and doctors in spreading the gospel of the value of social media.
Speaking during the final day of the New England Society for Healthcare Communications Spring Symposium in Portsmouth, N.H., Moegling said the need for health care marketers — whether they’re in-house or part of a consultant group — to serve as connectors is more crucial than ever.
Moegling said Revere was successful in warning colony residents of the impending British troop movement, because he was well-known and well-connected to the area communities, not because he was the loudest or had the fastest horse. While Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools have the same power to connect people, it is the marketers themselves that must be the nexus in either launching or growing a successful strategy. (read more…)
While building a base of Facebook fans has its place, UbiCare CEO Betsy Weaver argues, hospitals should place greater emphasis on measuring engagement.
Writing in a white paper released last week, Weaver uses a combination of expert research and interviews with hospital leaders to take a look at the ever-elusive idea of return on investment when it comes to Facebook use.
“When you hear someone say they have a Facebook page for a hospital and believe it can be successful without spending money, that’s surprising,” she said. “One of biggest costs is if you don’t invest in your Facebook account being robust and meaningful, it costs much more to work to to undo a bad first impression.” (read more…)
Using Wikipedia as a source for an academic paper will still get most people into hot water, yet a growing number of people are turning to even more dubious sites to verify facts for information about their health.
A survey of nearly 23,000 Americans, released last month by the National Research Corporation, says that 20% use social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, to help make health care decisions, with one in four saying the information found there was “likely” or “very likely” to affect their course of action.
Perhaps more telling was that 32% said they had a “very high” trust in social media — only 7.5% of respondents rated their trust level as “very low.”
These are not the young or poor making these decisions, either. The survey found the average age to be 41, while those with a household income of $75,000 or above were more likely than lesser earners to look to social media sites for health information. (read more…)
Marketers seeking to attract the attention of physicians may do well to heed the results of a recent comScore and ImpactRx study: By the time a physician logs on to the Internet, they usually know what they’re looking for.
Unlike some patients, the study points out, physicians typically know what sites they trust and wish to utilize when tracking down information in the health world. For example, the physicians monitored in the study overwhelmingly plugged in the exact Web address for categories such as pharmacy services and pharmaceutical support.
Even in cases where the provider didn’t know the URL offhand, a natural search via a traditional search engine was the most common way for physicians to track down sites — especially for physician-locator sites and general health-content sites — rather than relying upon ads or paid searches. (read more…)
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