Mayo Clinic’s healthcare “Facebook” offers challenges and opportunities

Mayo Clinic is possibly writing the primer on healthcare social media with its foray into Connect – Mayo’s twist on Facebook.

Roughly six months into operating it, Mayo Clinic Connect continues to be more popular than anyone conceived boasting 13,000 plus users. But Mayo is learning that running its own healthcare-focused social network requires dedicated resources to react quickly to problems.

“On the one hand you have the opportunity to make changes, on the other hand you have the responsibility to make them (and need to)dedicate the resources to make those changes,” said Lee Aase,director for Mayo’s Center for Social Media in an interview last week.

For instance, since the launch last year in July, users brought it to Mayo’s attention that when people based outside the U.S. tried to register on the site, they still had to select a state to complete the registration process. That must have frustrated some and driven them off but others randomly picked a state and got registered any way.

The problem has been solved with the state box getting grayed out when a user is from abroad, Aase said.

But the fact that among its 13,000 users, about 850 are from outside U.S. borders, is “quite an accomplishment” given the technical glitch some of them encountered, Aase said.

And Aase said more improvements are coming down the pike. They include:

• A new landing page in Spanish. (no surprises there, given Mayo’s Spanish-language Twitter effort)
• Automatic flagging of some keywords (these could be four-letter words, but more importantly phrases like “kill myself,” “suicide” or “I don’t want to live”)
• A new profile view such that a user sees his or her profile the same way other Connect user sees it in order to help them to easily alter privacy settings

Those changes may help to expand the user base even further.

Currently,Connect has garnered about a 1,000 users from Florida, where it has a campus, and the same number from California. Texas, Illinois and New York provide 600 a piece. And home base Minnesota has brought in 900 users.

Aase said that he was “pleasantly surprised” that with the exception of Minnesota, Connect’s user base is roughly proportional to each state’s population.

More women than men fill up the user ranks and the most active discussion threads revolve around women’s health, brain and nerve diseases and mental health.

With Connect, Mayo is boldly going where no one has gone before. Mayo’s brand name and the fact that at least one patient from each of the 50 states comes to Mayo Clinic every year, undoubtedly helps the Connect initiative. But Aase’s description implies how such an effort could have only been initiated first at the Clinic with its home in far flung Rochester, Minnesota.

“For us this is a great way to connect because we are separated by geography from the great population centers,” Aase said.