Hospitals

Healthcare social media: You’re doing it wrong

Ed Bennett, manager of web operations at the University of Maryland Medical System, has a message for anyone involved in healthcare social media: It's 2015, so stop acting like it's 2005 or even 2014.

Ed Bennett, manager of web operations at the University of Maryland Medical System and a member of the advisory board of the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, has a message for anyone involved in healthcare social media: It’s 2015, so stop acting like it’s 2005 or even 2014.

Writing for Mayo’s Social Media Health Network on Friday, Bennett lists 12 things people need to stop doing right now in healthcare social media.

We won’t give you the whole list here for copyright reasons, but it’s fair to say MedCity News is guilty of at least two, since we regularly create “listicles” (ironic, too, since Bennett’s post is a listicle) and our upcoming conference on patient engagement is called “MedCity Engage.”

However, we wholeheartedly agree with a lot of the advice, particularly these three items:

  • Stop freaking out about HIPAA. “Can you name even one hospital that has been fined for HIPAA violations brought on by social media? Violations are immensely more common in the physical world than in the digital domain,” Bennett said. For that matter, stop freaking out about HIPAA when patients ask for copies of their records.
  • General hospital blogs are old news. “Ain’t nobody got time for reading or even writing the general blog. Focus on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, you know, where your audience is and have you checked your blog stats lately?”
  • Don’t worry about Google Plus, since nobody else does. In fact, The Independent reported this morning that Google is slowly, quietly dismantling this attempt to compete with Facebook.

And don’t forget to join us at 4 p.m. EDT today for MedHeads, which we just happen to produce as a Google Hangout, a component of Google Plus that’s apparently being shifted to a standalone app.

Image: Bigstock

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