This is a live post from a SXSW round­table on ER 2.0, March 14^th, 2010

Hos­pi­tals and health care providers are slowly but surely using new media and social net­work­ing soft­ware for some of their pri­mary objectives–treatment, research, edu­ca­tion and out­reach, and patient-provider com­mu­ni­ca­tion. This pre­sen­ta­tion will fea­ture best prac­tices from case stud­ies and pre­scribe future uses of new media in pub­lic health.

Ed Ben­nett Uni­ver­sity of Mary­land Med­ical Cen­ter Ed Ben­nett man­ages web oper­a­tions at the Uni­ver­sity of Mary­land Med­ical Sys­tem (UMMS).He has over fif­teen years expe­ri­ence work­ing on the Inter­net, and has worn many hats ’ pro­gram­mer, designer, con­sul­tant, infor­ma­tion archi­tect, start-up par­tic­i­pant, etc. Since 1999 he has led the Med­ical Sys­tem Web pro­gram build­ing out large, content-rich web­sites designed to edu­cate and attract new patients. His cur­rent focus is the grow­ing use of Social Media and its poten­tial impact on health care. Ed main­tains the Hos­pi­tal Social Net­work List, which tracks the social media activ­i­ties of over 500 U.S. Hospitals.

Aimee Roundtree Uni­ver­sity of Houston-Downtown

Also pan­elling is Jen McCabe of Con­ta­gion Health.

How does this tech­nol­ogy com­pli­cate HIPAA compliance?

There’s a say­ing: “Don’t say no, just say HIPAA.” There’s a lot of fear and trep­i­da­tion around what might hap­pen, but best prac­tices are emerg­ing from those providers who are exper­i­ment­ing first. For exam­ple, some have writ­ten com­ment­ing poli­cies that pro­tect them, and so on.

The involve­ment in physi­cians in the social space is dis­ap­point­ing. They have a dis­in­cli­na­tion toward trans­parency because of the tra­di­tional patient — physi­cian rela­tion­ship that has been ingrained since med­ical school.

Why are hos­pi­tals so slow to adopt social media?

Cross­ing into the space where patients have direct online inter­ac­tion with their physi­cian is still a long way away, because of secu­rity issues. How­ever, when deal­ing with hos­pi­tals, it is a mat­ter of show­ing them how much good is pos­si­ble by using social tech­nolo­gies. We don’t remu­ner­ate doc­tors for inter­act­ing with patients in this way. Also, we are legally bound by reg­u­la­tory bod­ies, and these social chan­nels must com­ply with reg­u­la­tions as well. Twit­ter feeds are admis­si­ble in court.

One of the heav­i­est “things” to move is human resources. For exam­ple, the ques­tion of who is the per­son or peo­ple who are going to address “the tidal wave” of com­ing complaints.

The real-world expe­ri­ence is that 99% of com­ments are pos­i­tive or neu­tral, and there are very few com­plaints: “the unex­pected out­comes of social media for hos­pi­tals will be pos­i­tive, because we’ve antic­i­pated all the neg­a­tives” — Lee Aase, Mayo Clinic. Mon­i­tor­ing is the first step to under­stand how much is neg­a­tive, how much is pos­i­tive, where are the reported vari­ances, and who is doing the talk­ing. One of the most effi­cient means of com­mu­ni­cat­ing is to attach a face to an insti­tu­tion, and to add 10% to 20% per­sonal tweet­ing into these accounts. Exam­ples are Scott Monty of Ford and Frank Elia­son of Com­cast. By the way, it’s great to get neg­a­tive feed­back, because that high­lights what needs to be changed. Lia­bil­ity poi­sons the envi­ron­ment, but fewer law­suits arise when peo­ple treat peo­ple like peo­ple, rather than with­hold­ing infor­ma­tion.

What are victim’s rights online?

The place to start for patient advo­cates is with sys­temic advo­cacy for patient rights in gen­eral, so peo­ple start to trust you over time on a case by case basis.

What are the agents of change in hos­pi­tals and who should we work with?

Under­stand who holds the bud­gets and who is involved with patient care. Under­stand their com­mu­nity engage­ment strate­gies in the real world and show them par­al­lels online. How­ever, under­stand also that it is too early to prove that social media changes behav­ior, so it’s chal­leng­ing to legit­imize these tools.

What about com­pat­i­bil­ity with hos­pi­tal systems?

Hos­pi­tals use lots of sys­tems that don’t talk to each other. Some hos­pi­tals are block­ing Face­book access, for instance, whereas patients are using Face­book to talk about the hos­pi­tal. The imple­men­ta­tion of EMR is address­ing this to an extent and dri­ving a change in behav­ior. Ven­dors need to adopt open source stan­dards and look at inno­va­tions like microsyn­tax and HL7 from MIT.

What about com­mu­ni­cat­ing with patients through mobile devices, par­tic­u­larly for improv­ing the cus­tomer ser­vice expe­ri­ence? By the way, hos­pi­tals pro­vide the most opaque and worst cus­tomer ser­vice experiences.

Some hos­pi­tals and sur­geons are using Twit­ter to pro­vide updates dur­ing an oper­a­tion, after waivers are signed. This way patients’ fam­i­lies can be kept up to date dur­ing the hours of wait­ing. It’s a small but impor­tant step in cus­tomer satisfaction.

In Africa and the Philip­pines, social media adop­tion is increas­ing because social tools are the most inex­pen­sive to use for com­mu­ni­ca­tions, com­pared to legacy or tra­di­tional systems.

The devel­op­ing world is dri­ving inno­va­tion out of need. Maybe the answer in devel­oped nations is to iden­tify orga­ni­za­tions like freelancer’s union, iro­bot, and oth­ers, that have an incen­tive to dis­rupt the health­care sys­tem. Just build really awe­some stuff and you will start to see behav­ior change and integration.

We already have  a well devel­oped social media strat­egy, but our chal­lenge now is to get the physi­cians engaged. Is this even possible?

Hire for that. Find physi­cians that are already blog­ging. Find a leader that sets the exam­ple. Find some­one that oth­ers will follow.

What about cri­sis communications?

If as an insti­tu­tion you start to com­mu­ni­cate and to tweet, then you start to become the source of truth (rather than the media or some­one else). Go through @swhealthcare’s Twit­ter account to under­stand how they responded to crisis.

One of the best ways to drive change is to demand it as the health­care con­sumers we all are.

What tools are miss­ing? What are the new trends?

One big trend is cura­tion of health infor­ma­tion, which is grow­ing at an astro­nom­i­cal rate. Demand will never match sup­ply, so cura­tion is absolutely key.

er20, sxsw, sxswi, social media, health20, health, hos­pi­tals, health­care providers, social net­works