Social media benefits for the healthcare business
Jinfo Blog

By Joanna Ptolomey

Abstract

Medical director for the Mayo Clinic, Farris Timimi MD, believes that social media is not an addition to your job as a doctor and healthcare provider. It is a part of your job as a doctor and it cannot be ignored as a potential benefit to the system. So, if we trust doctors with a scalpel and surgical procedures should we not we not trust them with social media tools?

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Medical director for the Mayo Clinic, Farris Timimi MD, believes that social media is not an addition to your job as a doctor and healthcare provider. Timimi believes it is a part of your job as a doctor and cannot be ignored as a potential benefit to the system.

If we trust doctors with a scalpel and surgical procedures should we not we not trust them with social media tools?

Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) believe that social media use is having beneficial impacts on the business of healthcare. Furthermore these businesses should be encouraged further to engage in this way with the health of people.

There are nine ways that social media is changing business according to PwC:

1. Communication is shifting to public more open forums. User generated content, rapid distribution and two way dialogue is now available with possible cost savings.
2. Patients (and consumers) are taking a more active role in their health – possibly a more empowered health consumer.
3. Consumers want increased transparency with this bigger view of health content.
4. Quicker feedback from consumers and healthcare organisations can help the information process.
5. Patients (consumers) are becoming more picky around treatments and healthcare providers.
6. Surprisingly consumers trust social media – they consider the conversation with a person rather than the organisation.
7. It is no longer just a marketing tool but rather a way of doing business.
8. It can be used to measure outcomes.
9. Health insurers can focus on population health.

This does sound all fine and dandy, so why the cautiousness of some parts of the healthcare sector? Of course there are regulatory and privacy issues around integrating social media into the healthcare environment.

For example in the US the HIPAA privacy rules that provides federal protection for health information. This includes the confidentiality, integrity and availability of health information. In a recent Computerworld article a medical student reported that he was received warnings from his professors that against social media use could violate HIPAA privacy regulations.

In a recent MedCity article the old argument of wasting time online is mentioned. This comes down to trusting employees to do their jobs to the best of their ability using resources they see fit.

It may take some time to work out the regulatory frameworks around social media use in the healthcare sector as the norm. It is important that these tricky questions are faced, and solutions found, because industry needs the business changes and benefits that social media could bring as one of my recent posts highlighted.

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