by
John W. Mitchell, Senior Correspondent | November 24, 2017
From the November 2017 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
We can teach someone and hopefully lead to better care. The anecdotal feedback is that it’s happened. When we’re sharing our research or position papers that are authored by people in our department, we’re again getting that research out that hopefully helps change the way people think, or change the practice for the better.
HCB News: How did your background lead you to become a leading advocate for health care social media?
AT: The way it started was by looking for a way to promote the cool things the informatics team does every day and every year. I thought there were two ways we could really promote ourselves.
The first was the traditional academic route of doing research and publishing academic articles and going to meetings and presenting data or giving lectures on our experience, and we were already doing that. The other way would be advertising, which, in some ways, has never really hit medicine. It does with pharmaceuticals or device manufacturing, but there has never really been much from the education side of advertising. So, we thought social media presented a unique opportunity to do so at essentially zero cost.
We grew our social media enterprise with tools like Facebook and Twitter, then moved to starting a blog. The goal of the blog is patient and family education and engagement. We moved in our last step to Instagram and Figure 1 to teach our colleagues and other medical professionals at any skill level, even people who maybe aren’t in medical school or nursing school yet, all the way through people who are fellowship trained specialists and engage them at their level in a way that is respectful to our patients.
HCB News: For providers hoping to develop a social media presence, what are some tips to get started?
AT: It’s important to think about what your goals are. We have tried to do that with every new platform we roll out. Who is our audience? For the blog, for example, our audience is patients and family, and our content is therefore constructed very differently than Twitter, where our audience is medical professionals. Or Instagram, where our audience is people with a medical interest. Twitter is maybe the most specific where we target the radiology community as much as anything else.
We don’t cross promote very often because it doesn’t make sense for us, but knowing our audience means we can create content for that specific group and also build reproducible content. So, on Twitter, we may share articles or live Tweet conferences, or share our Instagram case of the day. On the blog, we would do things like meet the team. Who’s caring for your child? These are our radiologists. What does it feel like and why do we do things? What does it feel like to get a head CT or what does it feel like to get contrast? Why do we give contrast? Why do we make your child not eat anything before an ultrasound study of the abdomen? Those types of frequently asked questions.
