Symplur » Connecting the dots in healthcare social media

The Scoop #19 – Best Practices in Healthcare Social Media

symplur — Fri, 11 May 2012 12:08:27 +0000

Healthcare and Social Media

@TheDuffyAgency

Most healthcare organizations in the U.S. use social media solely for marketing. In contrast, hospitals in European countries such as the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom are embracing healthcare social media as a way to improve care management, engage patients, and communicate with other doctors.

7 keys to getting healthcare execs on board with social media

@hanyscomm

As social media continues to be employed as part of a healthcare organization’s business strategy, there are bound to be some who are leery of its benefits. But according to a recent whitepaper by the Healthcare Association of New York State (HANYS), refusing to recognize social media as a valuable source of communication is quickly becoming a major “don’t.”

How Social Media Can Help Caregivers

@CSCNews

Social media provides the platform for those engaged in eldercare to vent, to research, to share and to obtain useful information. It can even help caregivers get organized.

The Scoop #18 – Best Practices in Healthcare Social Media

Support Team — Fri, 04 May 2012 12:52:06 +0000

Patients choose hospitals based on social media

@FierceHealth

This report gives credence (and backs it up with statistics) to the influence that healthcare social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as well as online forums have on patient’s decision making process when it comes to selecting a hospital.

Social media and health care: opportunities and obstacles

@pwc_llp

Check out this fascinating, interactive table that reveals consumer attitudes and behaviors about social media in healthcare. Responses are broken up by sex, age group, education, income, and health insurance coverage. Based on responses made by more than 1,000 consumers.

A 12-Word Social Media Policy

@farristimimi

Dr. Farris Timimi, Medical Director for the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, states it quite clearly, “The biggest risk in healthcare social media is not participating in the conversation.” And he goes on to offer some simple to follow rules of engagement.

The Scoop #17 – Best Practices in Healthcare Social Media

symplur — Wed, 02 May 2012 04:42:57 +0000

Consumers using social media for medical information

@LATIMES

One-third of consumers are using Facebook, Twitter and other healthcare social media sites to seek medical information, discuss symptoms and express their opinions about doctors, drugs and health insurers, according to a new report.

Health consumers more engaged than healthcare companies in social media

@DOTmedcom

An excerpt from the article serves as an admonition to health care providers – “Experts say more corporations should be taking note, since consumers are increasingly making medical decisions based on the information they find on social media sites.”

Many Doctors Don’t Take Social Media Beyond Marketing

@InformationWeek

U.S. healthcare providers should learn from their overseas colleagues who use social networking to improve care management, engage patients, and communicate with other doctors.

Twitter for Healthcare … 50 Million tweets and counting

Thomas M. Lee, B.S., NHA — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 12:00:05 +0000

Health, whether our own or that of someone close to us, carries a high level of importance, interest, and ultimately common ground. And because of that we tend to talk about it. We seek knowledge and support. And with the rise of healthcare social media our ability connect with those who share our desire to converse and learn from one another has opened up amazing possibilities. Enter Twitter for healthcare.

Communities connecting via Twitter for healthcare

Twitter is certainly one of the easiest social media platforms out there on which to find and connect with individuals who share our interests. That’s because it’s largely an open platform. One that encourages connecting with people who we otherwise may never have known. And that holds true when you consider Twitter for healthcare. However, healthcare has an incredibly diverse presence on Twitter because of the many specialized needs that exist … each with issues that are uniquely their own.

We launched the Healthcare Hashtag Project eighteen months ago with the intent of helping to lower the barriers to using Twitter for healthcare interests. From the start it was intended as being a way of finding the conversations relevant to your own health interests, to discover who the thought leaders are, and above all to engage and contribute to conversations and discovery.

In that time we’ve seen advocates, providers, and patients alike flock to the project, provide us with numerous inspiring ideas, and contribute many new healthcare hashtags that have helped to facilitate the expansion of engagement and the birth of new online healthcare communities.

Twitter grants special permission to the Healthcare Hashtag Project

The Healthcare Hashtag project doesn’t rely on the standard data that’s available from Twitter. We’ve gained “elevated” privileges to the the Twitter Stream API from them. Thus, we’re able to track many more hashtags than we otherwise would have been able to. So let’s not forget to give a nod and a “thank you” to Twitter for helping the healthcare community to flourish on their platform.

Why should I use Twitter for healthcare exploration and engagement?

At the Healthcare Hashtag Project the community contributions and the expanding role of Twitter in healthcare have resulted in a captured conversation that just recently crossed the 50 million tweet threshold! That’s 50 million individual pieces of healthcare information shared. And it’s now at a level to where it’s growing at a rate of over 1 million healthcare related tweets per week. Too much for you to keep track of? No worries, we’ve got a complete, free transcript service that allows you to retrieve all of them. Just check out one of our individual hashtag pages to get the twitter transcript for that hashtag within the date parameters you specify.

Want more evidence that Twitter is one of the leading social media platforms for healthcare? Explore the project yourself. And once you do, I hope that you’ll be inspired to contribute to the ever expanding healthcare conversation taking place on Twitter via the use of healthcare hashtags. Let your voice be heard … and tune in to the many other voices who are sharing as well.

Twitter for healthcare is alive and well.

Learn more about Twitter for Healthcare … 50 Million tweets and counting at Symplur

Can We Measure The Quality of a Healthcare Conference Twitter Stream?

Audun Utengen, MBA — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 18:06:26 +0000

We’ve recently looked at a couple of record-breaking healthcare conferences (one here in the States and the other in Europe) as well as the value of social media for a healthcare conference specifically. The first two mentioned blogs looked at tweet volume, and the third used participant numbers as a metric. Tweet volume is a fun and very easy-to-use comparison metric, but unfortunately it doesn’t really give us much insight into the quality of the conversations taking place.

Measuring healthcare conference tweet quality by quantitative means

If tweet volume as a metric fails to measure quality, are there other quantitative metrics that can? Are there ways to measure this other than reading through all tweets and making a subjective judgement? I’m sure glad we have several excellent curators providing summarized blog posts about the conference and a short list of carefully selected tweets from the conference stream. Human curation can never be replaced.

Healthcare Conference Engagement

Let’s compare some metrics that may tell us something about the social media engagement of healthcare conference participants. We’re going to look at three very interesting conferences that recently took place: #himss12, #TEDxMaastricht and #TEDMED.

Can we measure how many attendees at the healthcare conference were socially active?

Obviously, there is no way for us to measure who was actually physically present and who was attending virtually. Unfortunately (at least for this study), less than 1% of tweets have a geo tag associated with it.

What is a good metric value? It really depends on the type of the conference. #himss12 is not just presentations and sharing of ideas; it’s also partly a very large trade/exhibition event from which one should expect less healthcare social media engagement. #TEDxMaastricht and #TEDMED are both pure idea- and knowledge-sharing conferences, highly conducive for social media sharing.
we should expect the social participation of a conference to exceed the physical participation as a new norm.
I would like to suggest that a 1:1 ratio of physical and social participants should be considered a success for such conferences. As the rapid growth of healthcare social media continues, we should expect the social participation of a conference to exceed the physical participation as a new norm.

Engagement distribution in a healthcare conference

We’ve looked at tweet volumes and participation ratios, but what about the distribution of the conversation? Volume and participation metrics can still give us the wrong story if the distribution is highly skewed. The assumption we would like to make here is that conversations that are more equally distributed among the participants are of higher quality compared to a tweet stream that is highly skewed by a few participants with a very high tweet volume. This assumption may not hold true, since the top tweeters by volume may indeed provide much value in all their sharing.

Average Tweets per Participant and Median

One very simple metric is the average tweets per participants, which is easily skewed by the top tweeters. The median, the numeric value separating the higher half of tweets per participants from the lower half, can in many cases give a more accurate picture with less “bias”.

Social Engagement Distribution Quintiles

The average and median are two very simple metrics loved for their simplicity (a single number to compare), but they very often don’t tell the real story. For a better impression of the engagement distribution, we’re going to visualize the percentiles of participant tweets, more specifically the quintiles. By comparing each 20% block of all the participants ranked by tweet volume, we can perhaps more easily compare the equality of conversation distribution across conferences.

From the colums above, we can quickly observe that the tweet volume of the top 20% tweeters of the #himss12 and #TEDMED conferences is proportionaly much larger than the next next 20%. There is clearly less difference for the #TEDxMaastricht conferene. This insight becomes a little more clear when we look at the trendlines. Our assumption is that more equally distributed tweet volume is better; in other words a flatter trendline is more desirable. We can visually see that the green line (#TEDxMaastricht) is flatter. That can also be confirmed by observing that the slope of equation behind the trendline is less steep (-2.664x) compared to the other trendline equations.

Pie Chart Visualization of Healthcare Conference Participation Distribution

The best visual for comparing tweet distribution is perhaps good old pie charts. In these pie charts we can see the proportion of tweets from each quintile in the context of the total number of tweets from the whole healthcare conference. Again, we can observe that #TEDxMaastricht had a more equally distributed conversation which may signify a broader participation and perhaps higher quality with less outliers.

Learn more about Can We Measure The Quality of a Healthcare Conference Twitter Stream? at Symplur

The Scoop #16 – Best Practices in Healthcare Social Media

symplur — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 18:50:03 +0000

5 ways to make social media work for doctors and their patients

@kevinmd

Physicians and other health care providers think that healthcare social media is complicated and time consuming. But, it’s not as difficult as you may think-here’s five ways to make it easier for you.

4 Social Media Strategies to Build Patient Loyalty

@HealthLeaders

In order to build relationships and truly connect with members of your community through social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, hospitals are learning that it takes more than simply pushing out a weekly bit of health advice.

Social Media is a Resource for Caregivers

@AgingCare

There is a growing trend among older adults who seek social media sites, not just Facebook and Twitter for information and support. It should be no surprise that caregivers find health care social media sites as well as other social media sites as great places for sharing experiences and getting answers to their questions.

How valuable is a social media presence for a Healthcare Conference?

Audun Utengen, MBA — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 19:25:00 +0000

We’ve recently witnessed a couple of incredible healthcare conferences taking place, #himss12 and #TEDxMaastricht, both ground breaking in their impact of healthcare social media. Today marks the last day of another huge healthcare conference, #tedmed, which of course have inspired us to have a another look at our database to see if putting numbers into context can tell us a story.

For us who live and breath healthcare social media, it’s a given that a social media presence for any conference can be incredible powerful and valuable when done right, but we are often approached by conference organizers who want an anwer to “how valuable?“. They may be a bit new to healthcare social media (hey, who isn’t?), but they have recognized that social media has a part to play in their conference, so the question quickly becomes, “how much resources should we put into this to make it right?” That’s a fair question, and the answer will obvisouly vary widely depending on the nature of the conference and your audience.

A Redefinition of Healthcare Conference Participants

No, your confernece audience is not the people in the room. It’s much larger than that. The knowledge and the stories want be spread around, and today it is – in real-time. So how big can the real-time audience of healthcare conferences be? Putting our data into context shows that the real-time audience can in fact be much larger than the people physically there.

The Social-Physical Conference Participant Ratio

Note that the social participants data is pulled from the actual days of the conference. One should really include a time period after the conference in order to get a more accurate picture of the amplification as information takes time to spread. The ratios will be greater. On the other hand, TEDMED also had live video feeds to select locations increasing their “physical participants” number.

With outcomes like these, how valuable is a social media presence for a healthcare conference?

Learn more about How valuable is a social media presence for a Healthcare Conference? at Symplur

TEDxMaastricht Sets European Record

Audun Utengen, MBA — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 22:49:06 +0000

It’s only been a little more than a month ago since we witnessed a healthcare social media milestone with the #himss12 conference. The growth of healthcare social media is nothing but breathtaking. @ePatientDave pointed out that #TEDxMaastricht created a volume of 6,414 tweets yesterday, April 2nd. With a closer look and by running some comparative analytics, that number turns out to be a European record for healthcare conferences.

Healthcare Social Media Quality vs. Quantity

While tweet volume is not the best of metrics for evaluating the conversation of a healthcare conference (can be inflated by individuals with focus on “broadcasting”), it’s positive to see that the average tweet per participant is significantly higher than comparable conferences. Seen together with other data points from our healthcare social media database, that may indicate a more uniform distribution of the conversation with fewer outliers. More data on this to come!

TEDxMaastricht analytics from the record day: 04/02/2012

6,414

Number of Tweets

1601

Number of Participants

267.25

Average Tweets per Hour

4.01

Average Tweets per Participant

See all analytics for #TEDxMaastricht

Learn more about TEDxMaastricht Sets European Record at Symplur

The Scoop #10 – Best Practices in Healthcare Social Media

symplur — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 19:16:28 +0000

Lucien Engelen: how social networks can solve the healthcare crisis

@Zorg20

Lucien Engelen is director of the Radboud REshape & Innovation Centre at Radboud University Nijmegen medical center in the Netherlands. His work looks at how new technologies can change patient care models in the context of rising demand for healthcare, shortages of skilled staff and restrictive budgets.

Use patient reviews to improve your Google rankings

@kevinmd

It’s important for physicians to monitor their online patient reviews to not only improve patient care and improve their online reputation but also to improve their web site rankings.

A Rheumatologist’s View on Social Media: Interview

@RonanTKavanagh

Dr. Bertalan Mesko’ (aka @Berci), an internationally known leader in healthcare social media. In this article he interviews Dr. Ronan Kavanagh (aka @RonanTKavanagh), a Rheumatologist from Galway, Ireland, about his use of social media and his own online presence. FYI … we’re proud to mention that Dr. Kavanagh is a client of ours. :-)

The Scoop #7 – Best Practices in Healthcare Social Media

symplur — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 05:55:33 +0000

Aging Adults Flock to Facebook

@CuprtinoCAPatch

The rapidly growing senior population is adopting social media and this post highlights the accelerating use of Facebook by seniors. Studies have confirmed the positive health effects of social media for seniors.

Healthcare Providers Can NOT Ignore Social Media

@edrneelesh

Healthcare organizations can’t look at social media as a business expense requiring justification from an ROI standpoint. Ed Bennett (aka @EdBennett) likened that to trying to gauge the ROI of using a telephone. Talking to your customers is priceless. In 2012, social media is how you do it.”

And that’s just one of these six great reasons for healthcare social media adoption. Check out the others.

Why doctors should embrace Google+

@kevinmd

Physicians take note of this healthcare social media platform – “Your patients will very much enjoy that you want to connect with them on this platform. In fact, they will seek you out because you communicate on this arena.”