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Collaborative Social Media: Review of Social Media in Healthcare

I confess to feeling ambivalent about social media.  On the negative side, comes the whine, “You mean that I have to learn that too?” I picture myself scrolling down the trackbar of my Crackberry like the mouse in the social science experiment that stimulates its pleasure center so often that it looses touch with the world, stops eating and drinking, and dies prematurely.

On the positive side, I see social media as a great equalizer.  It allows authorpreneurs like me to reach out in ways that previously only large publishing houses could do.  The idea of having my new book, Getting It Done: Lifelines from the Field, become a best-seller next spring compelled me to read Christina Beach Thielst’s new book, Social Media in Healthcare: Connect, Communicate, Collaborate.

I was not disappointed.  This 74-page book is an entertaining read, especially if one keeps to a schedule of a chapter per sitting rather than trying to master its contents all at once.  Readers like me who require repetition as a condition for mastery will find the three-page glossary at the end of the book helpful.  It ends with wiki, a website that allows users to create and edit interlinked web pages and build collaborative websites.

Established uses of wikis in healthcare settings include to:

• engage physicians to brainstorm,capture knowledge, and build a reference site of policies, procedures, and regulations that are a helpful repository for new physicians
• organize troubleshooting or self-help manuals, especially in health information technology
• quickly search medical staff bylaws for a topic of interest or concern
• minimize the amount of time wasted in meetings by giving participants access to documents ahead of time
• track project progress without requiring members to meet in person
• organize patient educational materials and thus minimize the amount of effort and time in teaching patients and families

I also liked reading stories of ways that healthcare organizations have begun to utilize social media.  For example:

• Innovis Health, representing 21 sites in North Dakota and Minnesota, used a blog and Twitter to communicate in real time with the public and staff as flood waters rose
• Patients planning to travel to Cleveland Clinic for care can create a Google Health account and pull information into it from their providers, pharmacies, labs, and other sources. Then, the patient makes the decision to push the information into the Cleveland Clinic record—MyChart—where it is stored in his or her electronic health record. Before the patient arrives, clinicians can review the information and make decisions about care. In fact, they frequently alter the first day’s schedule because of information the patient shared that they had not seen previously. In the past, the information arrived in paper form, and often too late
• Intermountain Healthcare’s primary care clinical program team turned their attention to addressing weight loss in kids because of concerns about childhood obesity rates in Utah. Using the same research team and data from the American Dietetic Association, they created the 8 Healthy Habits. With the communications department, they developed a plan to educate the public, especially kids. They approached the issue from a kid’s perspective and spoke directly to their audience about the need for a cultural change without talking about losing weight or criticizing those who were overweight.
  To reach a broader audience, Intermountain added humorous videos to its LiVe website and YouTube Channel. One video shows a mom driving her son next door for a play date, and another demonstrates delayed reflexes from too much junk food. The LiVe program gives kids practical tools they need to improve eating and exercise habits while demonstrating that it’s cool to be healthy.

In the last chapter, “A Vision for the Future,” the author noted:

To innovate and succeed, the new mass collaboration must become part of every leader’s playbook and lexicon.  Learning how to engage and co-create with a shifting set of self-organized partners is becoming an essential skill, as important as budgeting, R&D, and planning.

What do you think?

• Do you see social media as something to delegate or as part of your evolving toolkit
• Have you and your organization already begun to use social media; if so, how
• Have you found the return on your investment of time to be positive

As always, I welcome your input to improve healthcare collaboration.

Kenneth H. Cohn

© 2010, all rights reserved

 Disclosure:

I have a material connection because I received a review copy that I can keep for consideration in preparing to write this content.

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