Global Health, Fitness and Medical Issues

Doctors walk a difficult line as they try to discuss the fraught subject of weight without increasing the distress that many children already feel.

A presentation at the South African Pharmaceutical Expo (#SAPHEX2017) at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg about the future of e-Patients and Healt…

Marketing responsibilities for a health care institution or hospital often do not include “Social Media Management” at the top of the to-do list. This is for good reason, since hospitals, pharmaceutical and biotech companies are highly regulated, concerned with product privacy and consumer trust. Often people use medical and health care services not out of desire, but out of necessity. Social media marketing therefore can be tricky for healthcare or hospitals as they struggle with understanding consumers’ psychographics and what really makes them tick. However, this does not mean that social media and their varying channels should not be prioritized. It’s time to find out how your firm can thrive in the expansive social media marketing landscape!

Staying active on social media allows brands to serve your customers in innovative ways, build trust, listen to their needs, and keep your name top of mind. Your customers can include partners, patients, the public, and even your staff. The platform enables social listening, which is important for monitoring brand health, discovering issues important to patients, assisting in enrollment for trials, and discovering patient communities.

Creating a strong and consistent social media marketing plan is not only necessary for today’s firms, it can be a fun way for your health care organization to stay engaged with your audience. Here are six tips for launching social media marketing methods into your health care firm’s marketing mix.

Knowing the demographics and psychographics of your target audience is an essential place to start in building out buyer personas. Not sure who your target audience is? Start with some research, talk to your current customers and learn about their needs and desires. This allows you to figure out how your product or service fits naturally into their lives so your social media posts are more valuable.

User researcher can be done using a variety of methods. The most common and easily deployed are quantitative research surveys, using such free survey platforms as Survey Monkey, Google Forms, or Zoho Survey. These are useful when you need a wide range of customer reactions, or when you need to report on status, progress and check in with customer satisfaction. Their answers can give insight into valuable content ideas for social campaigns and learning more about your current customer landscape. The best time to send surveys is right after a customer has purchased something from your site, completed an appointment, or completed some other type of conversion. Keep surveys short, test on friends and colleagues before sending, and yes/no and multiple choice questions are best.

Another common tactic similar to surveys are user interviews, either via phone or email, which capture customer’s response to targeted questions. This can uncover aspects of your product or service that people are unclear on, which you can expand upon in your social media strategy, or topics they are interested in that relates to your offerings. These interviews are more in-depth than surveys, so it’s best to offer an incentive for completion.

Focus groups allow you to explore reactions, opinions, and perceptions of your customers using an open-ended exploration of specific topics. Discovering emotional reactions, your customer’s passions, and interests of each demographic segment are extremely helpful in building out personas. Focus groups are useful early in the course of a project or campaign to establish an initial direction for marketing initiatives, so if your firm has the resources, start here.

Ethnography or contextual inquiry is when you literally go with your customers to see how they use your product or service. If you have a product marketing team, get in touch with them as they likely know some of this information. User interviews, either via phone or email can capture customer’s response to targeted questions that can uncover aspects of your product or service.

A final, less expensive option is guerrilla methods, where you can dig through digital artifacts to uncover audience personas. For example, look at the people that follow you on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn and that seem to post a lot or re-share related content often. Boil down their age, possible interests and what type of content they engage the best with.  You can also use A/B testing methods to discover what copy or creative works well in other channels (such as email or paid search), and incorporate the winners into your social media strategy.

After all your research it’s time to build out your personas, which are an essential communication tool and useful for summarizing what you know about your customer. They help to highlight opportunities to tailor your marketing to your key customers, instead of wasting time and content tailored to the wrong group.

What should personas include? Be sure to root them to reality, based on the data you’ve gathered. What are their goals, needs, behaviors, pain points, scenarios, biographic information (age, gender, location, income), hobbies, occupation, and online habits? You need your personas to seem like a real person! Creating short stories about a person using your service or product to achieve a goal is also a good place to start. Describe what they would do and why they would do it. The seven top things to include in a marketing persona:

Look at your competitor feeds, or other industry related firms to see what they are doing in their social media landscape. You can even follow them on your personal pages to see what they’re posting daily. Copy cats are not always welcomed however. If your content is too similar to your competitors, switch it up and create a unique space on your channels. Need some inspiration? Check out these institutions social feeds!

Social media channels make the perfect news resource for your audience, which can include both internal stakeholders (staff and stockholders), and external stakeholders (vendors, customers, and patients). Health care is a highly regulated environment, so keep your followers up-to-date about relevant issues or changes in any related laws. This also builds trust as it demonstrates your firm is competent and an established leader in the industry.

Post relevant news articles, recently released research summaries, press releases, highly engaging blog posts, or internal company happenings. Creating posts that are focused on a related specific holiday or observance with hashtags can help your name seen by others using the same hashtag.  Below is an example from Merck using this strategy well.

People love social media because it is an easily digestible medium with visuals. Of course, you don’t have as much freedom as other businesses when it comes to sharing pictures of customers because of HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) laws, but there is still a wealth of creative assets to share! (Understanding HIPAA thoroughly is extremely important and we advise you review those laws and regulations before starting with social media. As a starter, you need to get written consent from all people in posted photos.)

Pictures of in-office fun, such as work anniversaries, birthdays or accomplishment celebrations are all great ways to humanize your practice or firm. Pictures from conferences, events, educational seminars, or community/volunteer outings help patients get a sense of what community means at your firm. You can — with written consent — post photos or videos of happy patients or end-users, with a story about their benefits. If you want to promote the comfortable, clean, or recently re-done space that patients would visit, share videos or photos inside of your office or clinic without the patients.

Staying current with news and press releases is very important in the sciences, however, if that is all you post, things will grow stale fast. Create unique campaigns that are run on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis to keep your fans coming back, and looking forward to the next campaign post. For example, you can create a Healthcare Podcast of the Week and exhibit different radio hosts; or a Monday Funny and share fun or relaxing cartoons. Campaigns can also include fun facts or trivia surveys, such as testing people’s knowledge on the best foods for fighting cancer, or proven methods for better sleep without prescriptions. Check out Buzzworthy as an example, people love their trivia!

We hope these 6 tips for social media marketing in the healthcare industry will benefit your social media strategy and overall growth of your firm.  The healthcare field is a very rewarding profession to be working in, and keeping all stakeholders engaged in your mission should be the first and foremost task.  If you can get across your firms value proposition to a relevant audience through your now carefully curated and researched social media content, you will grow followers, build brand awareness, and ultimately dominate your competitors in this space!

As patient advocates, one of our biggest responsibilities is providing strong, factual and supportive information to patients. This is certainly true for us at the National Association for Continence (NAFC) during a time like Bladder Health Awareness Month when a lot of the patients, caregivers and consumers we target are looking for information around bowel and bladder incontinence.

One of our biggest tools to help us provide this information to the community during this crucial month is social media. Every year, we arrange special social events to help spread our message along with adopting specific hashtags to ensure our materials add to the nationwide awareness raising efforts.

Outside of these simple steps though, some find using social media a confusing concept. To guide your own awareness efforts during BHAM, here’s our top five tips to using social media effectively to better reach your community.

1. See what’s working elsewhere

Every single one of us wants to create social media campaigns that are breakthrough and individual, but the key to doing so is not by isolating yourself. Instead, look at what is already out there and actually working.

For us, investigating the field let us understand which content works best over others, which primarily boiled down to easy-to-digest resources like video instead of copy. Another form of communication which worked really well for us last year was Twitter chats – Q&A sessions where Twitter users could follow our official #BHealth hashtag and ask questions and provide answers directly to one another.

Our investigations also informed us about how to build resource pages – as most website traffic now comes from mobile devices, relying on patients to move from a home page through to a desired resource is old-fashioned.

2. Create tools and resources of value

Traditionally, our industry has been about education for education purposes to drive a behavioral change for the better. But truth be told, that’s not how the marketplace works anymore. Consumers, patients and their loved ones, are more likely to digest educational material and do something when the content has legitimate value for themselves and others.

So rather than blasting out educational materials and hoping people read it, instead, create materials that are genuinely useful. A great example is using more image-focused materials like infographics and videos which are not only educational and visually appealing, but increase the likelihood of material being shared throughout communities. This is particularly true during a national awareness month where your posts will be competing against many others.

3. Pay attention to your analytics

Effectively using social media requires knowing what’s working and what isn’t. Using analytics platforms can help massively with this.

Major social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have their own analytics offerings along with Google Analytics – all of which can give a lot of information about content reach (how many people have seen it), engagement (how many people have done something with it) and many other useful aspects that help inform social media content strategy.

Even if you don’t use these tools throughout the year, they can provide crucial feedback on your efforts during major awareness months – they’ve certainly helped us refine our BHAM activities over the years!

4. Coordinate your content

Although it might be tempting to simply create what you think is great educational content and distribute it via social media, it’s vital that every single piece of content is in line with all other materials you produce across all of your media platforms.

Messaging, tone and the general composition of your content should all seamlessly coincide, no matter what form your social content takes. In doing so, you build your own community around your organization’s identity, making you a more legitimate and respected source of patient information. This community is then more likely to return and engage with your efforts not only on a general basis, but also during the next related national awareness event.

5. Plan out your content!

Possibly the most important part of creating effective educational content is by planning it and its promotion in advance.

At the NAFC, we plan an annual content calendar, but we have at least the next few months of content and its promotion well defined, giving us time to prepare and align our material’s messaging. Big events – like BHAM – can then be prepared for in the long term, making the event itself a lot easier to handle.

You may also find that a lot of the material you create and promote for big events can be repurposed throughout the year, saving huge content development costs.

Although healthcare providers have always communicated their message to other businesses, it has always had a slow evolution.

Social media platforms are an incredibly powerful tool and have been the main empowerment tool for patients. How is social media disrupting traditional patient advocacy and what must pharma do to stay ahead?

More and more surgeons are turning to social media platforms not only to connect with their peers but also to share experiences on new techniques and practices.

Facebook and Twitter are just two of the platforms that surgeons are using to replace face-to-face interactions, write assistant professors from Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School and Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety & Quality, Tufts University School of Medicine and the University of Michigan in a piece for Harvard Business Review.

The medium offers learning opportunities to further surgical education as the practice of surgery continues to evolve, the authors say.

Indeed, their study in the August issue of the Annals of Surgery on how robotic surgeons used a closed-membership Facebook group found that surgeons post the most and comment more on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday than other days. This suggests that the surgeons have incorporated the social media group into their weekly workflow rather than using it on weekends when they have more free time, the authors say.

Surgeons who use the social media platforms say that it allows them to hear from other experts in the field and helps them learn about surgical techniques and options that they may not have considered.

The authors say that hospital and healthcare system leaders should embrace the potential of the medium to augment in-person learning opportunities.

Peter Alperin, M.D., vice president of connectivity solutions at Doximity, the largest secure medical network, with more than 70% of all U.S. physicians as members, also wrote in a recent piece for Hospital Impact that many physicians have found that they’ve been able to expand their referral network to specialists by making use of networking on social media.

“Ultimately, partnerships like this allow physicians to share their expertise and help patients connect to the best treatments available, which is a win for both physician collaboration and patient outcomes,” Alperin says.

Presentation at the National Health Laboratory Services (NHLS) in Johannesburg, South Africa about the Fundamentals of a 21st Century e-Patient

Dr. Craig Spencer, who contracted ebola in Guinea, tells us what it's like to work for Doctors Without Borders during crises such as the ebola outbreak, the refugee crisis, and more.

Patients give a lot of weight to online provider reviews, using these online resources as key tools when making healthcare decisions, according to a recent surveyconducted by OnePoll in partnership with Binary Fountain.

In a survey of over 1,000 patients, respondents overwhelmingly came out in favor of online provider reviews. Ninety-five percent of respondents said they think online reviews of clinicians – such as comments left on Yelp or Healthgrades – are at least somewhat reliable. Three-quarters of patients said these online provider reviews have influenced their decisions about healthcare.

Thirty percent of patients have contributed to the growing number of online provider reviews, showing that patients don’t just use internet reviews to gather information about their providers. They also use online forums to air their medical grievances or praise a provider for a job well done.

Google emerged as the most commonly used review website, with 34 percent of respondents saying they use the search engine. Healthgrades was the second most popular (17 percent), followed by Consumer Health Ratings (13 percent), Rate MDs (13 percent), and Yelp (12 percent).

Patients aged 25 to 34 are most likely to share their experiences online, with 60 percent of respondents in this age cohort reporting that they have shared their health experience online.

READ MORE: How Providers Can Address Online Physician Reviews, Social Media

For all patients except those aged 18 to 24, Facebook is the most commonly used social media website for experience sharing. Patients aged 18 to 24 tend to use Twitter for this purpose.

These findings may come to the dismay of some healthcare providers, who have reported in other surveys that online reviews are a source of provider stress.

A 2017 report published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine showed that about three-quarters of providers find online reviews stressful. Forty-six percent said online reviews put a strain on the patient-provider relationship, 34 percent said reviews could lead to healthcare overuse, and 33 percent said online comments could harm patient experience with care.

Only 21 percent of providers said public clinician review comments were a good idea.

Nonetheless, patients do value online provider reviews. The Journal of General Internal Medicine confirmed that fact, as have numerous other patient-facing surveys. Therefore, it is important for healthcare professionals to learn more about online provider reviews and adapt to the patient-reported preferences emerging from online reviews.

READ MORE: Online Physician Reviews Stressful for Docs, Useful for Patients

The OnePoll/Binary Fountain survey showed that patients generally see healthcare and patient experience as complementary, meaning that patients want both quality care and good consumer focus.

Forty-eight percent of patients said a friendly and caring attitude was the most important factor in a care experience. Forty-two percent of patients value thoroughness of a care encounter, and 40 percent say they want a provider who can answer all patient questions.

There was a split along gender lines related to what constitutes a quality care experience. While 54 percent of women valued friendly and caring clinicians, 43 percent of men said they wanted their providers to be able to answer all of their questions.

Patients across the board were in agreement regarding time and clinician encounters. Forty-eight percent of all patients over age 25 said wait time was the most frustrating aspect of healthcare.

Forty-one percent of patients aged 18 to 24 said scheduling an appointment was most frustrating. This age cohort was three times more likely to become agitated with appointment scheduling compared to any other age group.

READ MORE: Using Online Reviews to Compare Patient Satisfaction Measures

Forty-eight percent of respondents offered open-response answers related to time management improvement, including: reducing wait times, better appointment scheduling, ceasing to overbook appointments, offering more availability, and responding more quickly to patient calls.

Twenty-seven percent of patients said clinicians need to take more time to be friendlier, to listen to concerns and answer questions, and to provide better bedside manner.

Time is a significant pain point for providers as well, separate reports have said. Clinicians do not intentionally neglect patient care, but often find themselves pressed for time to establish positive patient-provider relationships.

Research has shown that small efforts can help create more patient satisfaction, and ideally better online reviews. Nurses who ask to sit beside their patients – not stand – tend to see more favorable satisfaction reports.

And using strong interpersonal communication skills can help providers establish a non-medically-related relationship with their patients.

As little as providers may like it, online provider reviews are emerging as a mainstay in healthcare. As patients become empowered healthcare consumers, they are looking at online reviews to shop around for a provider.

Providers must understand that care quality and personal relationships are both critical to the patient experience. In doing so, provider to work toward a better patient-provider partnership and ideally a better online review.

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Over the last few years, social media marketing has gone from a helpful tool to a foundational marketing component for businesses and organizations of all shapes and sizes. This is especially true for healthcare providers and medical professionals who have a unique need to connect and maintain relationships with their patients. When used correctly, but carefully, social media marketing can provide your practice with an inexpensive, simple, and effective way to educate and engage with your current patients while casting a net for potential new ones. But simply existing in the world of social media marketing will not guarantee your success. That’s why our marketing professionals have dropped in to provide some tips on how to get the most out of your social media marketing.

1.) Communicate & Interact with Your Audience

You want your practice’s social media pages to have a unique, personal voice. If your posts sound automated or spammy, your audience will likely lose interest. It’s also vital that your page be interactive and to respond to any patient questions or inquires in a timely manner. Today’s patient requires a timely response time. We recommend never waiting longer than 24 hours. This will help your audience see your social media page as a conversation that they can be a part of instead of a one-way street.

2.) Provide Useful Educational Content

Your social media presence provides the perfect way to educate a wide range of patients about various health issues that are relevant to your practice. While you don’t want your content to be overly stuffy or academic, it helps to balance more self-promotional posts with useful information on subjects that you know your audience will want to know more about. There is no shortage of misinformation online about health topics. Try to make your social media platform a source people know they can turn to for accurate, trustworthy information.

3.) Don’t be Afraid to Advertise

Even for medical practices and doctor’s offices that may not partake in traditional advertising, social media posts and ads can be a terrific way to help your message reach a wider audience. Since many healthcare providers are less interested in online advertising, there may be more room for your information to flourish. Utilizing advertising on social media can help raise general brand awareness, drive potential leads to your website, or help spread the word about upcoming events or promotions that you are offering. The best social media ads and posts are typically simple, clean, well-written and accompanied by an eye-catching image.

Marketing in the healthcare field requires extra attentiveness and caution. For example, you must always be mindful of HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and other privacy regulations when operating in public platforms like social media platforms. When sharing links from other sites, make sure they are from legitimate, trustworthy sources. If you keep your social media presence active and professional, your time and effort has the potential to help foster relationships with your current patients while potentially attracting new ones. Follow along with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ for more marketing tips, updates, and more. If you would like to discuss healthcare marketing options, please contact McCauley Marketing Services today to schedule a consultation with our marketing professionals.  

Lecture given to SLMC IM Postgrad on Technology and HealthCare -- resources, platforms, ethics

Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy’s tweets that claimed a doctor sent her sister a Facebook friend request a day after treating her, and called his behaviour ‘harassment’, have been met with a bag of mixed reactions.

Chinoy’s story blaringly sounds the alarm of an issue which has been ignored for far too long, not only by the physician community but also by our society. At the core of this incident was a breach of patient privacy, but more importantly, the backlash it received revealed a lack of understanding and awareness about the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship. Surprisingly, most people did not think that a patient feeling vulnerable by her own physician was a big deal, and that is the most concerning part for me.

By definition, once a doctor sees someone as a patient, a doctor-patient relationship is established. Doctor-patient interaction is wound by delicate threads of trust and faith which are the foundation of this fiduciary relationship. The sanctity of this relationship, though primarily the doctor’s responsibility, is guarded by the patient’s awareness and sense of value about it.

Universally accepted codes of professional ethics obligate a physician to refrain from divulging confidential information or misusing it for any personal purposes. Just like other norms of society, these codes of ethics have evolved as a result of increased patient awareness, especially over the last century.

The historical model of the doctor-patient relationship that was prevalent during the first half of the 20th century was quite paternalistic. Based on the assumption that all physicians’ actions were carried out for the benefit of the patient, this model left the patients heavily dependent on the physician’s professional authority. Patients’ choices were not always taken into account and were easily over-ridden if they conflicted with the doctor’s convictions about the diagnosis or treatment.

However, in the last 50 years or so, the doctor-patient relationship has evolved towards a shared decision-making model. This model respects the patient’s involvement in their care and empowers them to analyse the risks and benefits of treatment and then make an informed decision. The doctor’s role has been limited to sharing information and giving options for the treatment. It is entirely up to the patient to accept or reject these suggestions.

While this model has been implemented in most western societies and provides the foundation of modern medical ethics, we find ourselves teetering between a paternalistic and a shared decision-making approach in our society.

Physicians in our society still use their sense of authority and superiority over patients, as seen in the paternalistic model, and hence feel lackadaisical about infringing the rights of their patients. Lacking clear guidelines and training of medical ethics, doctors often walk a thin line. However, due to a lack of awareness among patients and an absence of an accountability mechanism, most ethical misconduct goes by unnoticed. While some would take it as a blessing in disguise, to me these are lost opportunities to improve ourselves.

To add to the complexity of this issue, the last five years have seen a sharp rise in the use of social media among physicians as well as patients across the globe. The rights of a patient are not confined to the walls of the clinic or the hospital anymore.

We can’t deny that using social media in healthcare settings provides enormous benefits, especially in running awareness and prevention campaigns. At the same time, however, it also poses a risk to patient confidentiality and privacy. It also means less time for the doctors to spend with their families and less privacy for them as well.

Despite the pros and cons, the role of social media in medical practices is rising. With that rise comes a new challenge – defining the ethical standards of practicing medicine and doctor-patient interactions on social media. Previously, a conventional doctor-patient relationship had no space for personal interactions. However, the line between professionalism and personal space tends to blur, and sometimes even vanish, on social media.

Doctors using social media often face the dilemma of where to draw the line. What may be a genuine attempt to reach out and develop a rapport could easily be perceived differently by the patient. So we must clearly establish what is acceptable and what is not, so that the sense of responsibility and accountability surrounding this interaction is not lost.

Major physician organisations, such as the American College of Physicians and British Medical Association, have given their own guidelines to outline social media interaction between doctors and patients. These guidelines provide a working foundation to build and implement ethical standards while interacting with patients on social media. Physician organisations in our country have yet to develop a clear framework for doctor-patient interaction on social media, but pre-existing guidelines can be adopted without much change in the meanwhile.

It is time that a serious effort is made to add ethics to our medical education as well as to medical training. The physician community should also take charge of creating awareness among the public regarding their rights as patients and lead the effort to protect their rights.

It is the responsibility of the medical community to initiate a serious dialogue and perhaps develop a forum to address the complaints regarding the infringements of rights in doctor-patient relationships. The absence of such a platform keeps posing risks to physicians’ reputations as well as the rights of the patient, and encourages the public to resort to unconventional ways of expressing their concerns over perceived violations.

It is incumbent on physicians to uphold their moral and ethical codes and protect their dignity by working to preserve the trust of their patients. At the end of the day, we as physicians are responsible for the well-being of our patients, and how can we fulfil that trust if our patients feel insecure?

Virtual reality makes it easier — and a little more fun — for sick kids to deal with painful medical procedures. Find out more at HowStuffWorks.