Articles and Discussions on the intersection of Social Media and Healthcare. Relevant to Healthcare Practitioners, Pharma', Insurance, Clinicians, Labs, Health IT Vendors, Health Marketeers, Health Policy Makers, Hospital Administrators.
It’s time for healthcare organizations to make bigger investments in mobile patient engagement.
The past year’s pandemic struck a painful blow to health organizations’ pre-COVID patient engagement efforts. There are now fewer patient visits amidst coronavirus fears and stay-at-home orders.
People are simply not going into clinics to address non-COVID medical needs. The result is more serious health issues developing, such as cancers being found at later stages and chronic conditions advancing beyond easy treatment options.
As patient engagement strategies ramp up, mobile communication channels are becoming more attractive for reaching those living in geographically isolated areas, far from their medical providers.
While video visits have replaced many non-urgent in-person visits, those in rural areas struggle to use even telemedicine options due to lack of access or unreliable broadband connectivity. The travel is too far and the technology is not part of their daily lives making healthcare completely out of reach.
Because most people own a cell phone, mobile is an ideal way to communicate and elicit collaboration for health.
Healthcare systems that leverage mobile channels are finding this platform a powerful way to serve patients.
Text (SMS) is an ideal channel for reaching underserved communities, as one does not need a smartphone or broadband to send or receive SMS messages.
SMS also provides a quick and easy way for patients to send information back to their doctors about side effects related to the vaccines. Moving beyond one-way communication with SMS gives patients a way to ask questions or relay information on their current health status.
To take things beyond basic SMS, healthcare providers can consider fleshing out a full mobile communications strategy to deliver tailored analytics. With real-time data and services, staff work-flow can be improved and resources can be allocated more efficiently, also lowering costs. It’s the next step up from SMS but patients with chronic conditions who have mobile access to medical portals showed improved self-management and an increase in regular contact with their care team.
Its high time every physician, clinic and hospital, looks at incorporating mobile apps in their way of practicing medicine. Most have already started using it as a means of communication owing to the pandemic. Use that as a stepping stone into exploring the world of mobile touch points between patients and care providers, enhance your websites to be mobile friendly, or personalized mobile apps.
The healthcare industry sees technology as a source of inspiration for progress and innovation.
Health care is a complex system that is resilient to major changes but vulnerable to butterflies, where even a small amount of inputs has dramatic consequences. While future health trends are being discussed in the industry, some are most useful.
The health information technology market is expected to reach $390.7 billion by 2024. Processing 30 billion health care transactions cost almost $250 billion a year. Healthcare spending in the United States will amount to $5.4 trillion by 2024, which corresponds to an annual average of 19.6% of GDP.
As more and more healthcare providers outsource various administrative functions, these three trends will benefit the medical companies as part of their marketing strategy for 2020.
1. Internet of Things (IoT)
The Internet of Things is not only an executive fridge that orders its owner’s favorite food itself, or a service kettle that boils water on demand from a smartphone. These are smart bracelets, sensors, which you can remotely monitor your health.
IoT has advantages that make healthcare more reliable, efficient and faster. IoT-enabled devices enable remote monitoring, unleashing the potential for superior care.
The following examples show what healthcare can do with IoT.
Real-time location – medical devices such as wheelchairs, scales, sprayers, defibrillators, monitoring equipment or pumps are detected by sensors and easily detected by IoT. Other IoT devices help monitor the environment.
Wearable accessories are often used to monitor the user’s health for medical reasons, such as heart rate, blood pressure, calories burned, etc. The manufacturing industry is expected to have 240.1 million people in 2021.
Improved patient data and real-time tracking. The future for effective care is higher than ever before. It is now up to health care providers to make the best use of this technology.
In other words, in a few years, the world around us will become the Internet of Things.
2. Automated Medical Billing
They eat your wallet space, get easily lost, and when you try to find them, you realize you’ve already thrown them away. With medical bills, you always want to be very careful not to lose such important receipts.
Introduction of an automated billing system for medical services.
Let’s be honest, no one else wants to deal with paper receipts. Fortunately, medical bills are currently processed online or in the cloud. This new software allows your healthcare providers to effectively monitor and optimize their medical bills and payments. They will be able to review their insurance at any time without the risk of insurance errors, as the software will already report possible errors in advance. This increases the security of their records, so third party billing services are very popular. This is something that medical companies should consider for the coming year.
3. Patient Experience
A business that is constantly evolving is equated with clients that are also constantly evolving. The medical business is no exception. If you work with a professional and experienced medical invoicing outsourcing company, this will provide you with the best way to lead the way in identifying future trends and strategies related to the success of your RCM.
However, be careful with the use of personalized experience, sometimes users may have too complex instructions and directions. Improving patient experience begins with clear messaging and information, especially on practice-specific topics.
"First, there was crowdfunding, now there’s crowd-diagnosis"
Where people turn to strangers on social media to get a diagnosis — including for STDs.
This trend has been growing in popularity, but the authors of a new study say diagnosing STDs using social media can often be unreliable.
Thousands of people post in an online health forum seeking a “crowd-diagnosis” of their sexually transmitted disease (STD).
A new study found people have turned to Reddit for help getting an STD diagnosis.
Experts say this isn’t a great idea, since other posters may not have a medical background or all the necessary information to give a definitive diagnosis.
But there are online sites like CrowdMed where licensed medical professionals may help people who are worried about a possible STD.
Thousands seek STD diagnosis online
In the study, researchers from the University of California, San Diego examined conversations on the social media website Reddit.
Reddit has a subreddit, or online forum, where people share “stories, concerns and questions” about “anything and everything STD-related.” Researchers obtained all posts from the r/STD subreddit from 2010 to 2019 — almost 17,000 in total. These were public posts with no information that could be used to identify the original posters.
Researchers found that 58 percent of the posts were requests for a crowd-diagnosis. Of those, 31 percent included an image of the person’s physical symptoms. In addition, 20 percent of the people asking for a crowd-diagnosis was seeking a second opinion after seeing a healthcare professional for the same health concern.
The majority of posts received a reply, with more than three-quarters of those receiving an answer in less than 1 day. The average time for the first response was just over 3 hours.
Convenience drives people to health forums
One thing that drives people to online health forums is convenience. After all, try getting an answer from your doctor in just 3 hours.
But Keber says people need to be careful when using these types of resources.
“There is no way to know who is answering these questions and addressing the concerns of the people writing in this venue,” Keber said.
“I especially have concerns about [people] using this as a ‘second opinion’ following an office visit with a licensed professional,” she added.
Online forums like those on Reddit are peer groups, so people responding may not have any medical training.
This differs from online tools like CrowdMed, where licensed physicians, medical students, physician assistants, and other health professionals provide opinions.
The true scope of online crowd-diagnosis unknown
Although the new study provides a snapshot of how people are seeking health information online, this research has some limitations.
STDs are also a condition that can cause “significant anxiety,” says Keber. This may drive people to sites like Reddit, where they can get an answer in a few hours or less.
Public interest in online health forums like Reddit comes as many STDs are on the rise. This includes syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia reports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)Trusted Source, with a particularly large increase in people 60 years or older.
There’s also a lot of information missing from the Reddit posts that could help health officials understand what’s going on.
"Like many social media studies, this study didn’t provide info on the location of the people posting about sexually transmitted infections (STIs) on Reddit, whether they were being honest or if it was a hoax, how their actual STI risk compares to those not using Reddit, etc.,” said Sean Young, Ph.D.
“Although crowd-diagnoses have the benefits of anonymity, speed, and multiple opinions, many are wildly inaccurate,” study author Dr. Christopher Longhurst, professor of biomedical informatics at UC San Diego Health, said in a statement.
Doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital are working on ways to help patients better understand their chances of suffering heart attacks and surgical complications.
Karen Sepucha. runs the Health Decisions Sciences Center at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital. A few years ago she surveyed primary care physicians, and asked how confident they were in their ability to talk about numbers and probabilities with patients.
"What we found surprised us a little bit," Sepucha says. "Only about 20 percent of the physicians said they were very comfortable using numbers and explaining probabilities to patients."
Doctors, including Leigh Simmons, typically prefer words. Simmons is an internist and part of a group practice that provides primary care at Mass General. "As doctors we tend to often use words like, 'very small risk,' 'very unlikely,' 'very rare,' 'very likely,' 'high risk,' " she says.
But those words can be unclear to a patient.
"People may hear 'small risk,' and what they hear is very different from what I've got in my mind," she says. "Or what's a very small risk to me, it's a very big deal to you if it's happened to a family member."
Simmons and her colleagues are working on ways to involve their patients in shared decision-making. The initiative at Mass General gives patients online, written and visual information to help them. One of the goals is to make risk understandable — bridging the gap between percent probabilities and words.
The CQC will search for positive and negative comments about GP services on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, in order to discover the ‘reality’ of the care that patients are receiving, said the regulator today.
Launching a document which lays out their strategy and purpose for the next three years in response to the report into the failings identified in the Francis Inquiry in Mid Staffordshire Foundation NHS Trust, the regulator said it wanted to ensure they were responding to patient concerns more effectively.
The report also said it would introduce a ‘more robust’ test for new primary care providers applying for registration, although a CQC spokesperson confirmed that GP practices that have already registered would not be affected by the new process.
It also said that a proposed chief inspector of primary and integrated care will look at patients’ experiences as they move between different services. Jeremy Hunt announced in February that he was considering plans for a chief inspector to provide an ‘expert view’ of primary care to mirror the appointment of chief inspectors for hospitals, to uphold standards and make the final call when a practice is failing.
As Pulse revealed last week, the report also said when inspecting providers, practices will be judged on five domains, with inspectors asking whether practices are safe, effective, caring, well-led and responsive to people’s needs.
The CQC said it will develop new fundamental standards focusing on these five areas, although a ‘judgement’ element will be introduced to avoid ticking the box, but missing other factors.
They confirmed that the frequency of inspections will increase as the perceived risk of harm to patients increases. The regulator said it will also develop a series of ‘triggers’ which will allow it to predict future problems with services, and allow it make better decision about when, where and what to inspect.
The report also re-iterated a commitment to a better use of information, meaning information sources such as the ‘Friends and Family Test’ and reviews carried out by others will be used to inform their regulatory work.
The CQC strategy said: ‘We will make it easier for people to tell us about the reality of the care they receive and we will improve how we respond to and report on how their views and experiences have informed our work. We will focus on gathering the views of people in the most vulnerable circumstances.
‘We will search for both positive and negative comments on what is being said about services, including social media (for example, Facebook and Twitter) and other digital media such as or website. We will make sure that the full potential of the results of the ‘Friends and Family Test’ and other similar information is used in our work.’
It added that they will consider working with other agencies to carry out inspections, and will work with NICE to make sure they are clear about the measures used in assessments.
David Behan, CQC chief executive, said: ‘People have a right to expect safe, effective, compassionate, high quality care. CQC plays a vital role in making sure that care services meet those expectations.
‘We recognise that quality care cannot be achieved by inspection and regulation alone – that lies with care professionals, clinical staff, providers and those who arrange and fund local services – but we will set a bar below which no provider must fall and a rating which will encourage and drive improvement.
In developing our plans for the next three years we have looked closely at what we do and listened to what others have told us, to make sure we focus on what matters to them. The plans also take account of Robert Francis’s report into the failings at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust and the response by the Secretary of State for Health.’
The healthcare industry is finally catching up with the rest of the business world in expanding their social media offerings. Many in our industry are worried about social media due to HIPPA and other regulatory concerns. Those fears are slowly subsiding as a recent study published by the Journal of Medical Internet Research said 58% of the physician respondents stated that social media enabled them to care for patients more effectively, and that 60% stated it improved the quality of patient care they delivered. Many physicians and hospitals want to know how they can increase engagement within their Facebook community. Here are three simple proven tactics that will increase your EdgeRank and engagement on Facebook.
People love photos, it’s human nature as we’re naturally visual beings. The proof really lies in the pudding of Pinterest which is a photo heavy platform and continues to explode in popularity. HubSpot confirmed this theory in late 2012 showing that Facebook posts with a photo generated 53% more engagement than posts without a photo.
Fill-in-the-blank posts are a great way to build up your EdgeRank. These posts are easy to engage with and allow your community to show of their creativity. It doesn’t take much thought or context on part of your followers to comment therefore you should see much higher engagement and a higher EdgeRank score for your page. When using this tactic you’ll often see the comments outnumber the likes.
This basic marketing principle isn’t lost in the social media world. People need clear instruction on what you expect them to do. It still takes great content and a cleverly written post for you to get a conversion, but a call to action has shown to a critical element in increasing post engagement. Below is an example of a great photo of a nurse interacting with a sick infant in a neonatal ICU in Colorado Springs, CO. The photo is cute and heart warming, plus it has a beautiful infant in it. Both are huge pluses when it comes to engaging content! With a clear call to action the post did extremely well.
Almost all American adults have a voice search tool with them at all waking hours. You probably have one on your person right now. For iPhone users, it’s Siri, which also is on the MacBook and iPad. For Samsung users, it’s Google Now. Last year, people completed 250 billion searches with their voices. That’s one in eight searches.
There’s no question the demand for voice search is growing significantly. But how can you ensure you take advantage of it? Here are ways to capitalize on the trend line.
Start by developing your SEO
The most common response from voice assistants is to connect a user to Google’s top results. For example, when you ask a device a specific question like, “What is Tom Steyer’s position on the economy?” it will often direct you to five results in a mobile web browser.
Therefore, ensuring your campaign ranks at the top of Google has never been more important.
Use Schema.org
Voice assistants increasingly use microdata from Schema.org to surface results. So, make sure your pages have metadata from that site inputted.
Get Off Twitter, and instead build for Google
Campaigns and consultants spend so much time on Twitter. But it’s worth remembering, just 22 percent of American adults are on Twitter. Meanwhile, 73 percent of them are on YouTube (the world’s second-biggest search engine).
It’s a habit and a mindset change, but spending less time on Twitter and more time on Google/YouTube, will pay huge dividends for campaigns who can prove they are disciplined.
Create an extended FAQ
What is the primary input of voice assistants? Questions.
Use AnswerThePublic.com to produce a tree of all of the questions people are asking. You should have a page on your website that answers all of those questions and more. Then use the above-mentioned Schema.org to create microdata for the page that will help voice assistants populate the information to voice searchers.
Build an Alexa skill
An Amazon Alexa skill is a voice application. Similar to how Apple has apps on its App Store, Amazon has apps that work on the Alexa and can be created by anyone. Alexa represents the potential for what voice technology, especially for campaigns holds.
On a recent trip to Seattle, I met with two Amazon Alexa staff members. They explained to me that practitioners in voice should focus on building for two distinct purposes. The first is consumer voice experiences. These are voice applications that answer questions or provide information for commands.
The second purpose is conversational AI. These are advanced applications that make you feel like you are having a conversation with a person.
Develop CFIRs for your Alexa skill
CFIR stands for Can Fulfill Intent Requests. CFIRs populate Amazon Alexa’s database with information and are like keywords or key phrases that may invoke your skill.
Example: I was laying on my couch one day and feeling tired. So, I said, “Alexa, inspire me.” And a skill started playing and offering me inspirational quotes from Oprah, Muhammed Ali and other leaders. The creator of this skill had programmed “inspire me” as a CFIR.
These are similar to the questions and answers you put on your FAQ as well as commands and responses you want that users could invoke.
Publish keyword-rich videos on YouTube
Remember, YouTube is the world’s second-biggest search engine. Start supplying content for it. Publish answers to FAQs in video form. Publish campaign ads. And in your keywords, post the questions that voice searchers might ask their assistants. Google pulls heavily from YouTube for results, and this may cause your content to rank near the top.
Embrace brevity
Similar to people, voice assistants that talk too much and for too long can be annoying. Keep your answers brief — 29 words brief. Those 29 words are about 10 to 12 seconds. Meanwhile, make your questions a bit longer — about 9 words, as this is the average length of questions people ask their voice assistants.
So don’t get left behind. Follow these tips to optimize your campaign for voice!
Patient's interests and behaviors shift during the holiday season, and thus, so should your healthcare marketing.
The holidays provide an opportunity to be creative with your messaging and to strengthen the provider-patient relationship during a season filled with holiday cheer and a spirit of giving.
But the holidays can also mean a break in routine, which opens the doors for some mistakes. To make the most of your holiday healthcare marketing, read on for common mistakes doctors and dentists make around the holidays and how to avoid them.
These common mistakes can ruin your healthcare marketing
Not marketing your practice during the holidays
If you associate the holiday season with a lower patient volume, you may think healthcare marketing is less important this time of year. But choosing not to market your practice is perhaps the biggest healthcare marketing mistake of all.
By not marketing your practice, you’re counting yourself out of the decision-making process for those patients who are seeking care.
Timely and relevant content can make your campaigns more effective because you’re providing your patients with the information they find useful.
Thinking there’s less interest in health toward the end of the year
The holiday season may have its share of parties and late nights, but it would be a mistake to think there’s a lack of interest in health this time of year. On the contrary, during moments where people may be indulging more, there can be a heightened awareness of healthy habits.
New Year’s resolutions, for example, are often tied to health and productivity goals.
Not being inclusive in messaging
When planning your holiday healthcare marketing strategy, it’s important to create messaging and content that is inclusive of everyone. Being inclusive with your healthcare marketing allows you to reach more people and is especially important to younger patients.
Not updating your website and web profiles
The holidays often mean changing schedules for both patients and healthcare providers alike. If you have special holiday hours, make sure that communicating them to current and prospective customers is at the top of your healthcare marketing strategy this year. This gives patients the transparency they need to book an appointment.
An accurate and prominent web presence is an essential component of your healthcare marketing strategy, and this is even more important during the holidays when you may have less time to field questions.
Waiting until the last minute
Do not wait until the week before major holidays to start your holiday healthcare marketing. Give your patients ample time to understand any changes to your schedule or promotional offers. This also gives you a chance to share important messages multiple times, so you can ensure more people see them.
Healthcare marketing is a year-round effort. There’s always an opportunity to connect with your patients and make your practice stand out from all other care options. Keep these tips in mind when planning your holiday campaigns.
Social media marketing has essentially become unavoidable.
Finding healthcare social media success isn’t always easy. In fact, doctors often have the same few struggles.
Statista estimates the number of social media users in the U.S. will rise from roughly 244 million in 2018 to approximately 257 million by 2023. Given these numbers, standing out from the crowd on social media is important, but it isn’t easy.
Here’s some advice to help your practice overcome the common challenges of healthcare social media:
1. Highlighting patient success stories without revealing PHI
Incorporating patient success stories into your social media marketing is a great way to promote your expertise. However, be careful not to accidentally disclose PHI, as this can lead to a HIPAA violation.
"Knowledge is the key to avoiding this"
When compiling patient success stories for social media, work with a legal professional to create patient marketing consent forms. Otherwise, only discuss patients in general terms without revealing PHI, and always triple-check content for potential privacy violations before posting.
2. Reaching their target patient base
A Facebook post has an organic reach of just 6.4 percent of a Page’s likes, according to We Are Social. However, the average paid reach is 27.3 percent higher than the average total reach.
Given these numbers, it’s not surprising that 53 percent of companies use social advertising — i.e., purchasing ads on social networks — according to HootSuite. Social media advertising campaigns can be created to fit any budget, and they’re effective.
3. Determining good content to share
Growing your patient base is the overarching purpose for social media marketing, but coming on too strong will get you unfollowed fast. Generally speaking, approximately 80 percent of your content should be informative or interesting and 20 percent should be promotional.
4. Finding time to share and engage
You won’t engage your patient base by posting content sporadically and occasionally responding to comments.
In fact, 52 percent of small businesses post on social media at least daily, according to Clutch.
Schedule time on your calendar each day for social media marketing activities to make sure they don’t fall by the wayside.
Of course, as a busy doctor, you might not have time to effectively manage your social media properties. In this case, delegate this task to a member of your staff or take on an outside social media partner.
Proper social media management is a key component of an effective strategy.
5. Choosing the right social media platforms
Different demographics gravitate toward different social networks — i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. If you don’t take the time to figure out where your patient base is, your medical social media efforts might be wasted on the wrong crowd.
Maintaining social media accounts on multiple platforms will allow you to reach different demographics that fall into your target patient group.
6. Getting patients to share their content
The more your social media content is shared, the broader your reach. However, people don’t share just anything, post on topics important to your patient base, take time to proofread for spelling and grammatical errors, and share information from credible sources. You can also hold a social media contest where entry involves sharing a certain post and tagging a friend or two.
Patients want to connect with you on social media, but simply having an account isn’t enough to promote your practice. Finding success in healthcare social media requires a significant time investment, but it’s well worth the effort.
An advocate is a “supporter, believer, sponsor, promoter, campaigner, backer, or spokesperson.Social media is not an activity it's a strategy. Using this strategy with Patient advocacy is what this talk by Nrip Nihalani is about
When it comes to social media, the name of the game is engagement. After all, what good are all of those fans and followers if they don’t care about or pay attention to what you’re doing? Just last month, my team and I guided one of our orthopaedic clients into the top ten national “medium-sized” companies competing to win the Social Madness Competition presented by The Business Journals.
Below are some of the strategies we employed to become the “little orthopedic practice that could.”
Identify Your Facebook Target Demographic
Be sure to determine your Facebook page’s demographics before attempting to craft your messaging.
When your office utilizes social media, whom exactly are you trying to reach? If you just say, “Patients,” you haven’t looked into your page insights deep enough. By clicking on the “People” tab you’ll get a top-level overview of who your followers are – gender, age and even location. This information is key when crafting your messaging, as you wouldn’t have the same message for an 18 year-old-male that you would for a 64-year-old female. For this client, we target 35-44 year old females using key imagery and posts that appeal to the mom demographic.
Find Your Most Successful Post Types
Facebook is great for communicating with patients in part because it’s so versatile. You can post a myriad of topics and ideas that appeal to your specific fanbase and Facebook will keep track of how successful each post is for you. For free. Photos, status updates, links, videos – post some of each to find out which ones resonate with your fans. We’ve found that photos generally work best from an engagement standpoint – both in terms of clicks and interactions (“likes”, “comments” and “shares”). After photos, our most successful results have come with status updates, followed by links and then videos.
Create Interesting Content That Fits Your Successful Post Types
A snapshot of the Facebook reach and engagement levels for one of our clients.
Sounds easy, right? For the most part it is (though it gets a little more difficult when competing against the top companies in the country for months on end, but I digress). If photos work well, be sure to plan ahead and have some fun, creative ones scheduled for the month. Remember, Facebook – and social media as a whole – is supposed to be personal, so not everything has to just be an office photo with a doctor. Those are great and they shouldn’t be ignored; however, don’t feel like you can’t put up a crazy themed photo or a popular meme, too. When updating your status, let people know what’s going on in your office. Having a staff appreciation day? Show your fans your office has some personality. Happy it’s Friday? Tell the world. Odds are, they are, too.
We’ve also found that our followers really enjoy posts that relate to charitable giving and those that ask them questions while presenting facts. For example, come up with a statistic that relates to your practice and have your followers fill in the blank. Or, ask them to answer a true or false question about something you treat in your office. It may sound silly, but simple exercises like this will get people engaged, and it will get them to share the content with their friends and family (i.e. potential new patients).
The End Result
Ultimately, engagement should be your goal with social media, not click through rates to your website. Social media is your way to become more than just a medical practice to your patients. It’s your way to become a part of their lives outside of the office.
As an added benefit, when done correctly, you’ll see benefits within your practice walls as well. For example, just within the contest period alone, we had several patients tell us they scheduled an appointment with the practice because they found them on Facebook or saw a post their friend “Liked”. We were also able to schedule at least one surgery, thanks to someone finding the practice on, you guessed it, Facebook. Thanks to an increase of more than 800 page likes, we were also able to exponentially grow the practice’s organic reach to thousands of potential patients in just a few short months without spending a dollar. It’s all about engagement.
To get content containing either thought or leadership enter:
To get content containing both thought and leadership enter:
To get content containing the expression thought leadership enter:
You can enter several keywords and you can refine them whenever you want. Our suggestion engine uses more signals but entering a few keywords here will rapidly give you great content to curate.
Your new post is loading...
Its high time every physician, clinic and hospital, looks at incorporating mobile apps in their way of practicing medicine. Most have already started using it as a means of communication owing to the pandemic. Use that as a stepping stone into exploring the world of mobile touch points between patients and care providers, enhance your websites to be mobile friendly, or personalized mobile apps.