The three obvious business reasons for a healthcare organization to master social media are:
1.Branding
2.Physician Recruiting,
3. New Patient Development.
Most healthcare organizations see social media as strictly a BRANDING tool.
The gatekeepers for it will be Marketing, and it will be mostly used to broadcast feel-good stories.
There will be the occasional photo of the CEO cutting a ribbon or a “Meet Our New Physician” posting.
There will be strict avoidance of anything slightly controversial or experimental, and marketing’s principal focus on patient engagement will be how to take patient complaint posts off-line as fast as possible.
More forward thinking healthcare organizations may devote social media resources towards RECRUITING, and in particular, the most valuable form of recruiting – physician recruiting.
In this domain, if they’re lucky, the HR or recruiting department will have their own Twitter account and/or Facebook page. This allows for much higher frequency and targeting of social media engagement that would be inappropriate for the top level corporate social media accounts.
Of note: if you believe that hiring high quality physician talent is important to the future of your organization, then the ROI of a robust social media platform devoted to recruiting will be difficult to match.
Finally, at the leading edge of the best business practice for healthcare social media, will be its use in THE DEVELOPMENT OF NEW PATIENTS (also known as future revenue).
Here you may find the COO involved. The social media platform will be carefully intertwined with the website platform, which will then allow for the tracking of meaningful metrics.
The intent of this aspect of social media – yet to be achieved by the majority of healthcare organizations – will be to track the cost of a social media campaign through new patient appointment acquisition, and eventual the calculation of profitability. Once you have an ROI and a way to track cost of capture for new patients, the sky is the limit.
(Sadly, in my experience the difficulty in achieving this is because of the silo-lization of marketing, which controls social media, IT, which controls the website, and administration, which controls financial information, appointment scheduling, phone tracking, and electronic health record billing.)
Now mastery in any of the three areas above is great, and I encourage health organizations to pursue these vigorously. But let’s face, it neither branding, new patient development, or recruiting is healthcare organization’s principal mission.
Instead, a healthcare organizations primary mission generally involves improvement of the patient and/or patient population health.
Health. That is the brass ring of healthcare social media.
Right now I would say that using social media to improve people’s health is still just out of reach.
Part of this, I believe, is because the focus of using social media to improve someone’s health is principally centered around providing helpful information, but as any experienced doctor knows who’s tried to help someone stop smoking, showing a graph highlighting the dangers of smoking doesn’t really help too much.
Social Media is great for distributing information, and Information is certainly necessary to improve health, but it is not sufficient.
Improved health nearly always stems from long-term behavioral change and taking actual specific physical actions.
Here is where things get very interesting.
Within the Healthcare Universe, we tend to think of companies such as Facebook and Twitter as social networking companies, and Apple, Google and Amazon as leading high-tech companies.
But with the advent of such things as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Bg Data, Wearable Technology, and the Semantic Web, this is no longer how these companies see themselves.
I believe these large companies are beginning to see themselves as behavioral change agents, and If you don’t believe me, just take a look at the 2016 presidential election results, and the role Facebook and twitter played in it!
Now, granted, these companies mostly want to change people’s behavior to benefit their shares stock price.
Put another way, Amazon mostly wants you to buy more stuff, and Google mostly once you to use their search engine more.
However, in theory ,any or all of these organizations could equally well be using the technology and platforms to help change behaviors which can contribute to better health. The only element that is missing is there a financial incentive for doing so.
I know that for most healthcare administrators and most physicians, who are still struggling with whether or not to allow their staff to tweet, this is mostly pie-in-the-sky stuff.
But it’s not, because when Apple or Google or Amazon directly enter the healthcare market, their focus will be on considering ways to monetize behavioral modification to improve people’s health.
So the bottom line here?
Certainly dip your toes in the social media waters by focusing on the three healthcare business considerations listed above.
Certainly try to master these.
But equally important, make sure you are thinking deeply about social media in terms of your primary mission: health.