Pulse
Media Master
Mayo Clinic has embraced social networking and is sharing what it has learned with others in healthcare.
Search for “Mayo Clinic” on YouTube and you’ll pull up 4,560 results. Topping the list is a video clip of an elderly couple playing a duet on a grand piano in a Mayo auditorium. You’ll also find a cardiac patient talking about shared decision making, Philadelphia Phillies outfielder Jayson Werth describing his experience as a patient, and Stephen Swenson, Mayo’s director of quality, previewing a conference. Like the rest of what’s on YouTube, Mayo’s shorts range from the silly to the sober to the scientific.
So what is the venerable health care system doing on YouTube?
Following a 100-year-old tradition, according to Lee Aase, director of Mayo Clinic’s Center for Social Media. “Our reputation, people’s preference for Mayo Clinic, has always come from word of mouth,” he says. “Social media is an extension or amplification of that word of mouth.”
By the Numbers
43,020
people “like” Mayo’s Facebook page
140,000-plus
Mayo’s followers on Twitter
7,551,178
YouTube views of an elderly couple playing a piano duet in an atrium at Mayo
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Aase hadn’t yet realized that back in 2005, when Facebook was only two years old and YouTube had just been conceived. But the then-manager of media relations, did understand that new technologies offered him ways to do his job more efficiently. The clinic already was producing ready-for-broadcast audio and video recordings. He decided the next step was to create an RSS feed, so patients and consumers could subscribe and have the files sent directly to them.
Whether it was his good timing or luck, Aase isn’t sure. What he does know is that almost immediately one of the podcasts got featured in an iTunes directory, and downloads of Mayo Clinic podcasts spiked from 900 to about 74,000 in one month.
That led Aase and others to start blogging, create a Facebook page, and start using Twitter. By 2009, there was so much activity around social media at Mayo that it attracted the attention of incoming CEO John Noseworthy, M.D. He sent a note to leaders asking if Mayo ought to be doing something more formal with regard to social media. “That gave us license to dream a little bit,” Aase says. Over the next months, he put together a proposal to launch the Center for Social Media.
The center opened last July and now has a staff of 10, a 30-member advisory board that includes social media experts from around the world some of whom are also physicians, and a similar advisory group from throughout
Mayo. Its purpose is twofold: to accelerate the pace of adoption of social media within Mayo and to help other health care organizations do so as well.
Staff now spend time not only creating the daily tweets, posts, and blogs from Mayo but also responding to the questions and comments they generate. On a day in mid-March, Facebook posts included one from a woman concerned about her father’s liver cirrhosis and parents concerned about their 5-year-old with food allergies. There were thank yous from satisfied patients and a complaint from a disgruntled one. Aase says responding to such posts makes a difference for patients. “[It’s] getting them access to information that they
Tweeting MDs
A letter to the editor published in the February 9, 2011, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association describes a study of physicians’ Twitter use.
Researchers identified 260 English-speaking “tweeters,” each of whom had 500 or more followers and identified themselves as physicians. Content analysis of more than 5,000 of their tweets found that about half were considered health- or medicine-related.
Three percent (144 of the tweets) were categorized as unprofessional—potentially violating patient privacy or containing profanity, sexually explicit content, discriminatory statements, or unsupported claims about a product they were selling or service that they were providing.
Source: Chretien C, Azar J, Kind T. JAMA. 2011;305(6):566-8.
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couldn’t get through traditional media.”
Staff also are developing curriculum for Mayo employees on professional issues and the ethics of using social media in health care, and they’ve launched the Social Media Health Network to share what they’re learning with
outside organizations. The hospitals, clinics, and health-care-related associations that are members of the network pay a fee to join based on their size. In return, their employees get access to curriculum produced by Mayo, online discussions, webinars, and conferences. In March, the center sponsored its first major event for members, a summit at its Jacksonville, Florida, campus that included a social media “bootcamp.”
Aase’s advice to anyone wading into the social media waters for the first time is simply to try it. He says he started blogging personally because he wanted to get a sense for what he calls “the social media ethos” and some practical experience. “With some of these things, you’ve just got to experiment with it. And you can experiment with them in a relatively low-risk way. The thing I’ve learned is that these tools aren’t complicated. If they were, there wouldn’t be half a billion people on Facebook.”
AMA Weighs In on Social Media
With more and more doctors blogging, tweeting, and facebooking, concern about the appropriate use of these new ways of communicating with the public (patients included) has grown. That prompted the American Medical Association (AMA) to create a policy on social media last year. The policy acknowledges that social media outlets offer physicians new opportunities for personal expression and for educating the public about health matters. But it cautions that inappropriate use has serious professional consequences. To guide physicians through this brave new communications world, the AMA recommends that they:
- Uphold patient privacy and confidentiality standards while using social media;
- Routinely monitor their own online presence to ensure that personal and professional information on their own sites and content posted about them by others is accurate and appropriate;
- Maintain appropriate boundaries with patients in online communications;
- Consider separating personal and professional content online;
- Inform colleagues when their content appears unprofessional so that those individuals can take appropriate actions to remedy the situation. If the behavior significantly violates professional norms and is not stopped, the physician should report the matter to the appropriate authorities; and
- Recognize that content may negatively affect their reputations and undermine public trust in the medical profession.
The policy is online at: www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/meeting/professionalism-social-media.shtml.