Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

Health Care Social Media List is now hosted by Mayo Clinic.  Originally started and updated by Ed Bennett, the list has been taken over by  Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media as the Health Care Social Media List (HCSML).

The Mayo Clinic blog does a great piece on the thoughts behind the move

Four years ago Ed decided to create a resource for social media advocates in hospitals. He thought it would be great if those facing skeptical administrators could begin the conversation with a list of peer institutions already using Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.

Thus was born the HSNL that Ed has hosted on his Found in Cache blog until now. List maintenance had been a manual labor of love, and yet he didn’t have to programming resources to streamline the process.

When Ed decided he had accomplished his original goal and announced his plans for one final update before achiving the list, we approached him about continuing HSNL. See his thoughts on the move.

More here

Thanks to @DrVes for the heads up on this – those fortnightly healthcare social media updates are great!

The guys at symplur have done some amazing stuff.  The Healthcare Hashtag Project collects tweets (so far 80 million of them!) concerning healthcare and disease, categorized, logged and available for use. Initially, the idea was to manage this list of health related hashtags with a focus on the “business of healthcare”. Now, they have a new section dedicated to Twitter hashtags related to diseases, conditions, and other personal health related topics.

For example if I click on Bulemia this is what I get (and I can specify the time period I want to look at):

This is a curated list of twitter hashtags for diseases, conditions and related discussions.  It enables you to discover where the healthcare conversations are taking place, and who to follow within your specialty.

As Symplur explain

Well, we’re finally catching up with a progressive community of patients who are remarkably active in healthcare social media….  Once again, our goal is to lower the barrier to entry for physicians, hospitals, and other healthcare professionals who are interested in integrating healthcare social media into their respective businesses.  And what better way to do that than to invite the patient, caregiver, and healthcare provider communities to collectively join one another in these active discussions where each has an interest, concern, and a contribution to make.

If ever there was a vast database of information that can mined, here it is. Check it out

Great presentation by Chris Boyer on how to measure the effectiveness of your hospital’s social media efforts.  Some very practical examples such as:

ROI = (financial gain/savings – cost) divided by cost.  Chris suggests there are three ways to measure ROI:

• Drive growth goals
• Lower marketing/comms costs
• Increase satisfaction and loyalty

and gives examples of each.

A little while ago I was interviewed about the work I do at BodyinMind.org.  This is a website that writes about pain research.  We started it just over 2 years ago, and now have over 9,000 unique visitors every month from over 100 countries.  That’s great you might think, but there is still the ‘So What’ factor.  Is this actually making any difference?  The jury is still out and we are trying very hard to measure whether what we are doing makes any difference at all to pain research or clinical practice.

The Mayo Clinic has been very influential in its use of social media to educate patients.  It has lofty aims – to connect researchers with their network for example (no easy task).  In this short video Mayo Clinic CEO John Noseworthy, talks about Mayo Clinic’s Center for Social Media and the Social Media Health Network and what he views as the essential role of social media in the future of health care.

Last year I compared Australian and US hospital social networks based on data collected by Mike Cadogan – Life in the Fast Lane, and Ed Bennet – Found in Cache.  This is the state of play just over a year on.

Hospital social networks 2010

US and Australian Hospital social networks Oct 2010

Hospital social networks 2011

US vs Australian Hospital social networks Aug 2011

In just under a year, Australian Hospital YouTube accounts have risen from 1% to 8%, Facebook remains the same at 9%, Twitter has risen from 0 to 1%, and the number of hospital blogs has stayed the same at 1% (we don’t have LinkedIn and Foursquare data). Australian hospitals still have a long way to go.  Especially with the recent news that one Aussie blog, the ImactedNurse.com and associated social media sites were closed.