The Mayo Clinic wasn’t sure what to expect from social media when it gave it a test run four years ago.
Things like iPods, MySpace and blogs had exploded onto the social
scene, and businesses were looking to cash in. But the health care
industry had other considerations, and more rules to play by.
The interest was not exclusively marketing and advertising, but
rather how to use the technology to transform the access, delivery and
dissemination of health information. And then there were other issues
like patient confidentiality and related privacy issues.
Mayo started with a podcast, largely unsure of what it was doing.
There was no staff dedicated to new media, so a few of the public
affairs employees hastily podcasted a 60-second broadcast radio feed
normally provided to radio stations.
Then they waited. Then they watched as a few listeners grew to some 76,000 in one month. They knew they were on to something.
Mayo Clinic has come a long way in
just a few years, since adding a Facebook page with more than 3,000
friends, a YouTube channel with videos of doctors talking about
illness, treatments and research, a health blog for consumers and
another for media to improve the process of medical reporting. It’s
also creating “secret groups” on Facebook to connect patients to others
with similar illnesses, an area it hopes to expand in the future.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg in the brave new world of Health 2.0.
The Internet in its infancy, or 1.0, was all about accessing
information.
Think WebMD.
But where Web 2.0 describes the onslaught of
user-generated content like Wikipedia or Yahoo Answers, Health 2.0 is
defined by the use of social software and its ability to promote
collaboration between patients and the rest of the medical industry.
Having a company Web site is so five years ago.
Social media — the
umbrella term for blogs, social networks, photo video and podcasts, and
other user-generated mediums — is the new era. And the possibilities
are seemingly endless.
Try a virtual existence in Second Life. The Centers for Disease Control, Partners HealthCare System and CIGNA Corp. all have active pilots to test scenarios and study behavior in the virtual world.
Then there’s Medscape, a social network for doctors that has a
format similar to MySpace or Facebook and includes 100,000 physicians.
It’s similar to its predecessor, Sermo, and both are exclusive to
verified physicians.
Nemours, the Jacksonville-based children’s health system, has used
social media in the process of creating its upcoming hospital in
Orlando.
It established a blog for its family user group to make
recommendations on the design of the hospital, which breaks ground next
month.
Nemours also has a two-year-old viral media campaign featuring
parent testimonials and podcast speeches by Chief Executive David
Bailey.
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