Social Media and Healthcare

Social media bombards users with memes, cat videos and political squabbles. 

For thousands of women facing an aggressive form of breast cancer, Facebook recently brought another, less common offering: hope. 

“We were having a really, really difficult time finding patients,” said Casey Bales, project manager for triple-negative breast cancer research at the IU School of Medicine. 

She coordinates clinical trials – studies in which patients receive drugs or other treatments to try to understand their effects on health outcomes.

The breast cancer trial, begun in 2014, wasn't going well. Three years into the study, less than 40% of the patients needed were enrolled. 

“The trial was in jeopardy,” Bales said last week.

It was saved in 2017 when Facebook posts from the Vera Bradley Foundation for Breast Cancer and IU researchers about a trial using genomics – the study of genes and their functions – to find weaknesses in cancer tumors appeared.

Indiana University researchers and the Vera Bradley Foundation for Breast Cancer used the popular networking website and Instagram to recruit participants for a clinical trial. The first-of-its-kind social media effort jump-started a once-moribund effort that led to a Dec. 13 announcement that doctors say could save the lives of patients with triple-negative breast cancer. 

Recruiting through social media has become an important tool for physicians and medical researchers, who can sometimes have difficulty finding patients with specific forms of diseases they are trying to study. 

“We are implementing social media efforts pretty much on every new trial,” Bales said.

“Social media gives us an opportunity to leverage communities and resources to interact with a much broader community than we've been able to reach before,” the report said. 

Lisa Hayes is a survivor. 

The 62-year-old Indianapolis woman was diagnosed 12 years ago with triple-negative breast cancer. 

“I didn't even know (at the time) there were different kinds of breast cancer,” she said in an interview last week. “I just thought breast cancer was breast cancer. That's a scary feeling, to know you had a very aggressive kind of breast cancer.”

Hayes endured surgery to remove cancer, eight rounds of chemotherapy and 33 rounds of radiation. She now leads R.E.D. Alliance, an advocacy group working to reduce late-stage diagnosis and death rates for black women with cancer. R.E.D. stands for Reaching to End Disparities.

Her cancer is gone, but Hayes has wondered whether it might come back. She did not participate in the recent clinical trial but said the research is important to her and other survivors. 

“It's great news to hear what they have done,” she said. “It gives hope and promise to everyone coming behind me. It's very personal to me, in that respect.”

Read More: https://www.journalgazette.net/news/local/20191222/facebook-helps-clinical-trials-for-iu-vera-bradley

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!

Read More: https://www.campaignsandelections.com/campaign-insider/how-to-optimize-your-campaign-for-voice-search

Many of today’s leading health threats aren’t ones that science or medicine can solve alone.

Changing trends in communication and unequal access to care to mean we need new solutions and partnerships to overcome these global challenges.

Facebook is developing products and partnerships that can help people connect with resources to support their health.  

Take the issue of blood shortages. Every few seconds, someone in the world needs blood. But people often aren’t aware of shortages and don’t know where to donate. To address this, we launched a feature in the US, India, Brazil, Bangladesh, and Pakistan that makes it easy to sign up as a donor on Facebook and get notified when nearby blood banks are in need. So far, more than 50 million people have signed up to donate.

Another area we’re exploring is preventive health. Tens of millions of people in the US are missing out on recommended preventive care. Preventive measures have the potential to detect disease early when it’s most treatable and, in some cases, prevent it from developing. Yet factors such as awareness, access, and cost create barriers to testing for many people.

• We’re working with US health organizations to offer a Preventive Health tool that connects people to health resources and checkup reminders. 
• People can use the tool to find affordable places to receive care, set reminders to schedule tests, mark when tests are completed, and more.                                                                              

Our initial focus is on the top two leading causes of death in the US: heart disease and cancer. 

How Preventive Health Works

In the US, people can search for Preventive Health in the Facebook mobile app and find out which checkups, such as cholesterol tests or mammograms, are recommended by these health organizations based on the age and sex they provide. Reminders for flu shots will also appear at the appropriate time of year. 

The tool allows people to mark when tests are completed, set reminders to schedule future tests and tell loved ones about the tool to increase awareness of preventive care. People can also learn more about each checkup and find affordable places to receive care.

Privacy Matters

Health is particularly personal, so we took privacy and safety into account from the beginning.

For example, Preventive Health allows you to set reminders for your future checkups and mark them as done, but it doesn’t provide us, or the health organizations we’re working with, access to your actual test results. Personal information about your activity in Preventive Health is not shared with third parties, such as health organizations or insurance companies, so it can’t be used for purposes like insurance eligibility. 

We know there’s more we can do to help people, and we’ll continue to partner with organizations to provide access to resources and reach people in diverse communities.

Read More: https://about.fb.com/news/2019/10/connecting-people-with-health-resources/

By their nature, hospitals are fast-paced environments that can induce some stress in the people who work there. Often, the roles taken on by people saving others' lives are somewhat thankless.

For this reason, Penn Medicine's Center for Digital Health created "High Five," a web-based recognition system that enables staff members to easily use social media-style memes and humor to compliment each other on anything from the routine to the extraordinary.

The Center for Digital Health -- which studies how things like the internet and other digital technology affect our health -- began exploring whether a web-based platform would be feasible in health care in 2016.

The designers believed that making it easy for staff to quickly send out a nice message in a way that is now second instinct to many would increase positive interactions and potentially serve as a tool to combat burnout.

"Keeping it fun and light was us trying to build on what folks already do naturally on social media and via texting," Lee explained. "Humor and levity can organically incentivize folks to connect and support each other. So we thought it made sense to capitalize off of that natural inclination when we were trying to build an opt-in recognition system."

High Five, named for the congratulatory gesture, is usable across multiple devices and easily accessible through a webpage that clinicians could reach as if they were working on electronic health records. Each person can search for and select a colleague from the health system, then pick from a variety of memes or GIFs containing positive phrases that were congratulatory or humorous. 

The images draw from pop culture or are health-themed and some are the same as memes used commonly on social media. In addition to the images, each message could also be personalized by an accompanying text written by the user. A reply function was also added shortly after launch.

High Five has expanded since it was launched in 2016 into several different areas at Penn Medicine such as other emergency departments, Women's Health, Pharmacy, and an intensive care nursery, among others.

Users now hail from all 20 academic departments within Penn Medicine, and 32 percent of hospital employees have exchanged 28,808 communications expressing courteous interpersonal behaviors, ranging from appreciation and recognition to specific feedback.

A new study published in NEJM Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery led by Kathleen Lee, MD, an assistant professor of Clinical Emergency Medicine and director of Clinical Implementation in the Center, showed that this system was adopted by the vast majority of those within the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP) -- the first department it was fully integrated into.

"The status quo expectation in many settings in medicine is perfection without recognition, Medical errors can result in harsh consequences, while successes are not often not recognized to the same extent. This imbalance is thought to be a key contributor to clinician burnout," said Lee, who led the research with David Do, MD, an assistant professor of Clinical Neurology, and Ian Oppenheim, MD, a fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who helped to launch "High Five" while he was a resident at Penn Medicine.

Moving forward, the team involved with High Five hopes to expand it across the health system completely, especially with the installment of display monitors.

"We want to continue to partner with departments and groups to help further harness the workplace civility and positivity that High Five enables," Lee said.

Read More: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-12/uops-pmu121019.php

''Media” has long been part of our moniker here at MM&M – it is, quite literally, the third M of a brand that started its life and remains, at its heart, Medical Marketing and Media – but 2019 marked the first year in quite some time that we attempted to cover it on more than a semi-regular basis.

Frankly, we picked a fortunate time to start, given the flood of transformative news during the year.

But don’t take our word for it. For the final Third M dispatch, before we change calendars, MM&M asked several of the smartest folks in and around health media to answer a few questions about the people and trends that stood out during 2019. Their responses did not disappoint.

Here’s hoping for a similarly scintillating 2020.

What was the most important, most welcome, weirdest, coolest or otherwise most interesting trend or event in health media during 2019, and why?

The physicians who embraced TikTok. There are about 20 doctors (as well as residents and medical students) who are using the popular video platform to share health information. What I find jarring is the juxtaposition of medical topics with the informal nature of the videos. However, I am far from the Gen-Z audience that makes up a significant portion of the TikTok demographic.

“The value of the platform for health education was highlighted by Dr. Rose Marie Leslie in September when she created a video on the dangers of vaping. It amassed millions of views and led to mainstream media attention from ABC News, among others. Clearly these physicians are doing something right because many of them have gained tens of thousands of followers on TikTok. We’ll be watching.” – Eileen O’Brien, managing director, social media, W2O

“Authenticity. From UX design to chatbots, the bar for creating an authentic experience for the consumer has been elevated this year. Authenticity in 2019 evolved beyond the selection of a credible spokesperson for messaging—it’s about infusing it into every brand attribute, using a variety of elements (e.g., voice and visuals) to create an inimitable and trustworthy consumer experience.” – Tabytha Gil, linguistic insights analyst, Ogilvy Health

“The rise of voice search, which essentially means two things. First, with respect to the voice search queries input via your mobile phone or tablet: There are a variety of different statistics out there, but most analysts estimate that approximately 30% to 55% of all U.S. search traffic is being driven by voice search at the moment. This means that both your SEO and SEM strategies need to evolve. This is especially so for health, as voice search is already prompting many more long-tail keywords. The specificity of these keywords is an important point to note, with patients more likely to speak complicated clinical search terms rather than trying to type them.

“Second, there is an entirely different type of voice search playing out across AI-powered smart speakers, like Amazon’s Echo or Show, or the Google Home and Nest Hub. In these scenarios, particularly when there is zero UI or no screen, how can a brand take advantage of voice-driven search queries? One can easily envision this working in an unbranded example, but the billion-dollar question is how can branded search results populate in a compliant manner? The entire voice search economy will be a fascinating one to watch in 2020, but make no mistake: Both Amazon and Google are hard at work figuring out a way to monetize this smart search inventory.” – Justin Chase, EVP, innovation, and media, Intouch Solutions

“The focus on awareness, education, and support around mental health, from organizational, partnership and consumer perspectives. Second, patient influencers and advocates are driving health actions, and brands started to notice. As for the coolest event in 2019, Healthline Media partnered with wellness advocate Nitika Chopra to create Chronicon, bringing together hundreds of influencers to the first daylong event devoted to people struggling with chronic health issues.” – Ingrid Eberly, VP corporate marketing, Healthline Media

Read More: https://www.mmm-online.com/home/channel/media-news/health-media-2019-the-year-in-review/

Dr. Rose Marie Leslie is hoping to reach teens with a message about the dangers of e-cigarettes. So she’s started posting regularly on TikTok, the popular short video app, and has collected a large following.

Leslie, who goes by @DrLeslie and is a family medicine doctor at the University of Minnesota Medical School, has amassed more than 300,000 followers on the platform in recent months. Most of her TikTok videos offer insights on health issues that impact teens, ranging from how to talk to doctors about birth control to why it’s a bad idea for a group of friends to share a lollipop.

She’s best known for getting real about vaping and vaping-related illness. The issue is more urgent than ever for many parents, with surveys showing that vape use at an all-time high among teens amid an outbreak of a life-threatening vaping illness. 

Part of the problem, according to medical experts, is the teens aren’t aware of the risks because public health organizations aren’t communicating with them on the platforms they use.

That’s where Leslie comes in.

Leslie doesn’t talk down to the viewer, but instead shows side-by-side images of a vaping-related lung injury and a normal lung biopsy, and discusses the root causes.

In one video, she shows her followers what vaping lung illness really looks like under a microscope. “That is terrifying,” she says in the video.

Leslie says she gets a lot of messages from teens who have stopped vaping because they watched one of her videos.

“I expected it as a primary-care doctor who’s often talking to teens about the health risks associated with something like vaping that’s perceived as cool,” she said.

Greater engagement on TikTok than other platforms

Leslie is just one of the doctors who have recently started popping up on TikTok. Far more physicians are on Twitter and Instagram, which are more popular with older generations.

But those who have taken the TikToK plunge say they are experiencing far greater engagement on content there than on other social media platforms.

Jefferson Health’s Dr. Austin Chiang, one of the most active physicians on social media, recently joined TikTok after reading about how it’s taking off. 

Chiang uses TikTok primarily as a platform to talk to other young doctors about issues that matter to them, like the cost of medical education or the sacrifice of giving up their 20s to spend nights and weekends in the hospital.

Chiang says he already sees the most engagement on TikTok, which is used by more than 700 million people daily, according to its owner ByteDance.

Chiang and Leslie are also using TikTok to combat health misinformation.

“I’ve heard the criticism that doctors and other medical professionals on social media are somehow less credible, or won’t be taken as seriously by their peers,” said Sherry Pagoto, a behavioral scientist and professor at the Department of Allied Health Sciences at the University of Connecticut. “But I think that school of thought is going to be a thing of the past.”

Pagoto notes that medical experts need to meet teens where they are, rather than sticking to the older methods of advertising on television or Facebook.

“It would be great for public health organizations to follow the lead of these medical professionals on TikTok,” she said.

Read More: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/29/doctors-use-tiktok-to-talk-to-teens-about-vaping-birth-control.html

Healthcare social media marketing has evolved significantly over the past decade.

Gone are the days of social media managers posting the same or similar content across one, two, or three social media profiles and calling it a day.

Given the importance of social media in healthcare, the team at Convince & Convert wanted to identify common trends across social media marketing from the top U.S. hospitals.

Our New Healthcare Social Media Research

Convince & Convert reviewed all Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube public posts from January 1 – March 31, 2019, by 54 of the top U.S. hospitals, as determined by bed count and the 2018–19 Best Hospitals Honor Roll.

We used Rival IQ for content aggregation and in-depth competitive analysis of all 54 hospitals’ social media efforts. We gathered insights into how hospitals use private messaging by directly interacting with hospital Facebook pages through Messenger.

We also ranked the Top 20 Hospitals in Social Media based on a ranking score that includes Audience Size, Engagement, Engagement Rate Per Post and Total Posts.

The 4 Best Practices for Healthcare Social Media Marketing in 2020

Here are the 4 best practices of healthcare social media marketing that will help you set your strategy in the right direction this upcoming year.

1. Diversify Your Channel Mix Beyond Facebook and Twitter

Our research found that hospitals post on Instagram less than once every two days, but publish to Twitter and Facebook at least twice per day on each channel. Based on posting frequency, Instagram and YouTube are as secondary channels, despite these audiences being more engaged.

2. Vary Your Content Mix to Optimize Audience Actions

More than half of the best-performing posts included photos of people. Twenty-seven of the best 50 posts clearly showed the faces of people or babies.

In addition, curated content links have higher engagement: 35% of links shared by hospitals are curated, meaning they are not from the hospital’s own domain. Posts with curated links earned an average of 0.033% engagement per post, while links originating from the hospital’s own domain generated half as much engagement, at 0.015%.

3. Boost Top Performing Posts Organic Posts

While engagement is trending down across social media as a whole, brands are circumventing declining organic reach by spending money to ensure their content is getting seen.

In fact, 5.5% of all hospital Facebook posts we analyzed are signaled as “likely-boosted”, according to Rival IQ. Of those likely-boosted Facebook posts, the engagement rate per post was 177% higher than the non-boosted posts.

4. Connect with Niche Communities

While Facebook Brand Pages continue to be used by patients and hospitals, some hospitals are beginning to leverage Facebook Groups and Messenger to create deeper connections with audiences. 

In fact, 30% of the top U.S. hospitals are making Groups part of their Facebook strategy. Twelve of the 54 hospitals (22%) are currently or have recently used Groups as part of their Facebook outreach.

Social media marketing is the present and the future is returning to a one-on-one approach of engaging with audiences directly, be it in a private message or in response to a recommendation. Users are eschewing the spotlight in favor of smaller, niche communities where their presence is valued and they are not just a number.

Read More: https://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-marketing/healthcare-social-media-marketing/ 

"Love it or hate it, voice technology is here to stay."

Voice search isn’t perfect, and it’s nowhere near as advanced in its capabilities as it will be in just a few years. But it‘s already affecting the way people search for services and providers. 

From its novel start to its rapid infiltration into more of our lives, voice-enabled tech (or voice assistants) is changing the way we access and use healthcare. In fact, Amazon recently greenlighted six healthcare companies to develop apps for Echo (Alexa), and HIPPA compliant apps are already in the works for several major players.

Here’s Why People Love Voice Search

• Users expect instant answers, especially when it comes to healthcare. Voice queries are 40 times more action-oriented than search. (source: Google) Action, in the world of healthcare, is about finding the nearest urgent care or asking where to fill a prescription. 
• Voice delivers the conversations people want. If you’ve performed a search using a voice device, you know it’s more conversational than typing a search. For example, when you search for a movie theater on your browser, you might type, “movie theaters Boise.” But when you ask Amazon Alexa, you’ll probably ask in a manner like this: “Alexa, what’s the nearest movie theater near me?”

How Voice Search Is Changing Healthcare

It isn’t just yet, but the voice will likely become a dominant search method in the future. Preparing for it today will put healthcare providers, systems and organizations at a distinct advantage when that time comes.

Here’s another example of voice search that goes deeper in detail: A voice-enabled phone helps patients go from a vague and general search of a “doctor near me,” to ask a more involved, conversational question like: “Hey Google, find a five-star rated orthopedic surgeon near me who does knee replacement.”

Future of Voice Search 

What’s next in the voice-enabled technology arena is virtually limitless.

My theory is that once it becomes the search mode of choice, marketers will find a way to profit from it. Think of the sponsored ad format on the big three search engines, and apply that same execution to voice. Now when someone searches for the services you provide, that potential patient receives a conversational response from your practice—giving the user that instant solution, through conversation, they’re looking for.

Consider the possibilities of voice search (and later, voice sponsored content) especially if you’re an urgent care, ER, primary care or hospital.

Read More: https://healthcaresuccess.com/blog/medical-marketing-advertising/voice-search-healthcare.html