Way back when… the mobile telephone and fax machine were innovations, as were numerous other communication devices. We traveled through the period of everyone wanting a website, survived the dot.com crash, lived through ‘everyone wants an app’ and have rolled our eyes at everyone wanting a Facebook page.
Our social thinking has evolved, along with our ideas as to how we can use social media for even more good than we previously thought possible.
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While we can’t claim social media to be an innovative solution (we could have 20 years ago), we can suggest social media is still an innovation to the way we communicate about health.
If we adopt well, we have the potential to create a patient centric outcome.
Why?
There is now recognition that health consumers are online, using searches and social connections to understand their situation at a deeper level.
More so than just using ‘Dr Google’.
It’s certainly something we heard frequently at the #MayoInOz conference in Melbourne
NOTE: Mayo Clinic is a nonprofit medical practice and medical research group based in Rochester, Minnesota. It employs more than 4,500 physicians and scientists and 57,100 allied health staff. Wikipedia
“People are using their social networks to learn from each other.”
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Google and Mayo launched a health search. You can read more about this here: http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-health
Let’s continue…
People = consumers, patients, carers etc who like to engage to understand.
Therefore:
Organisations = like Mayo Clinic, have created the tools for them to do so. In this wisdom, they have created a massive online repository of data about patients concerns, issues, worries… and solutions.
Clever hey!
Mayo, as an organisation, will be able to learn enormously from the wealth of information patient share – enabling them to provide services better, cure diseases (or at least commence relevant research – which has occurred spurred by patient discussions), and more.
Why the elevator pitch?
The elevator pitch is that instant capture of what we are on about – the 5 second easy share, the stimulating few words we use to inspire, entice or share something of interest. So, if you were asked in the elevator what your health professional social media policy was – how would you answer?
Well hopefully you’d start by saying you just use guidelines for your social media actions.
We say social media is simply another way we can communicate and yet, we still need guidance to make sure what we do is valuable. Why? Well, we want to get the best possible result from our effort without upsetting anyone or damaging our own reputation in the process.
We should give consideration as to why we are using social media.
As we don’t have a separate policy for telephone or elevator conversations, why create one for conversations on social media! By creating guidelines, we acknowledge all social media platforms and devices are just another set of communications tools, under broader public relation and reputation management considerations.
“Mayo Clinic believes individuals have the right and responsibility to advocate for their own health, and that it is our responsibility to help them use social media tools to get the best information, connect with providers and with each other, and inspire healthy choices.”
My elevator pitch for using social media?
“Social media is a fantastic opportunity to connect with your community, to raise awareness and educate about your specialised topic and to grow and enhance professional networks.”
Charlie-Helen Robinson
Quote from;
Charlie-Helen Robinson 