The Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media has a mission to personalize healthcare by using social media. Crazy – you say? By following best practices, healthcare providers can share their stories. True – covered entities and their business associates may not share protected health information. But we can share stories about our institutions and share health information.
On Facebook Groups, we can engage with visitors to our pages and share health tips in closed groups. Will we meet some criticism? Yes, we will. But we gain by learning from customer criticism. Better yet, we make new friends by sharing more information. Criticism can be an opportunity when you have a playbook that details how to handle criticism.
Can we communicate in in 140 characters? Yes, particularly when we add photos to our posts. Images convey information graphically when words fail. Don't share photos of identifiable patients, but use medical or other images that also convey the message. Can we share information from third parties other than patients? Not by scraping the content. Infringing content causes legal issues. Luckily, most social medium platforms provide tools that permit you to share website pages, including a photo from a page you share.
Don't be shy, tell your story, and share your patients' stories with their permission. Let's make healthcare more approachable!