How Clinics Can Leverage Social Media: Being an Online Shaman
For a long while it was felt that the medical profession was one way or another prisoner to the so-called Parkinson’s Law, proposed by the scholar of public administration Northcote Parkinson in the early 1950’s, which stated something akin to “work expands so as to fill the time available”.
Yes, about a couple of decades or so ago it would have been sacrilege indeed, if someone had suggested that physicians should devote an hour or so daily or weekly to come out of their self-imposed shells and interact with other members of the human race. But as they say “change is the only thing that is constant”, and the medical profession, like any other field of endeavour came within the grasp of the information technology revolution, and needless to say it changed the face of it forever.
Medicine and Social Media:
Today’s medicine is so-called wired, just like many other fields of human activity, including interacting socially. While on the public front medical records are now being stored and exchanged electronically via EMRs/EHRs, electronic health exchanges, and the like, on a personal front more physicians are coming together socially via social networking sites, collectively known as social media, to discuss recently published scholarly articles, render their opinions, interact with their patients, answer their questions, and to keep themselves abreast of the latest trends in a particular form of treatment.
Not surprisingly those trends these days become viral mainly through sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Tumblr, Yahoo, etc.
What Social Media Can Do For Your Practice:
Consider that you are a fairly regular blogger on either your clinic’s blog or some other forum. If your blog garners the attention of regular visitors, it means that your opinion is highly valued and patients and doctors alike consider you a pundit on a topic. Besides showcasing your writing skills, earning goodwill, and learning something in the process, the most important result may be that you and your clinic are becoming the cynosure of all online eyes.
This can only benefit your practice immensely offline, and revenue curves may very well start heading north in a few months. In short, blogging and social media interactions may be the best thing you can do to promote your clinic’s cause.
What Physicians Feel About Social Media:
David May, MD says: “Twitter can function as large-scale doctors’ lounge.”
He also says, “The social media world is such an intense, immediately responsive place that you can have tremendous amounts of traffic pointing out the good and bad about an article itself technically, about the concepts that were put forward, and about potential flaws that were in a paper.”
A survey by the Journal of Medical Research revealed the following: The survey was based on 485 responses received from 1,685 online surveys sent.
- 85% of oncologists and primary care physicians used social media at least once a day or once a week.
- 60% said that social media improved the care they rendered.
- 24% utilize social media to investigate new medical knowledge.
- 58% believe that social media can be a good place to come in touch with high-quality information.
- 14% of them personally contribute to the medium daily.
How to Start Blogging, If You Have Not Already:
Although starting to blog should be fairly easy, even for those not particularly savvy about the online universe, the beginner may be faced with slight obstacles. So, even though WordPress may be free, getting used to it may take some time for the absolute beginner. Also, using some of its features properly like Publicize and the like may take still more time.
And if you are planning to append a blog to your clinic’s website (which might have been created in the previous century), it may require some site management skills. But rather than seek the services of a web designing company, it would be prudent for you to seek your EMR support services or your medical billing vendor or medical coding vendor, who surely must have exposure to this. And if they already perform this as a service to other physicians, that would be a real icing on the cake.
