The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare Essay
The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare Essay
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In today’s technology-based society, we enjoy easy access to myriad sources of digital communication and information. However, along with this resource comes great responsibility which is privacy. As nurses navigate social networking sites sometimes unknowingly approach a dangerously thin line between professional and personal online etiquette and even run the risk of violating patient privacy. Inappropriate use of social media can cause serious lawsuits.
Social media is also expanding into different areas related to health. For example, PatientsLikeMe (2014) is a newly created service that allows patients to monitor their disease, treatments, and self-reported experiences. The social component allows users to share information with other patients that have the same medical condition, as well as with health researchers and healthcare providers. There are a growing number of sites for health and healthcare related purposes, such as tracking health measures, rating healthcare providers, and hospital services (Fox & Duggan, 2013b). Social media is being used by people across the healthcare system, so it is prudent to discuss the benefits, risks, and best practices for social media amongst nurses.The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare Essay
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The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare
Social media opens many opportunities for health systems. It allows organizations to build connections, share discoveries, and develop credibility as thought leaders. Through platforms like Twitter and Facebook, physicians and health systems can share relevant health alerts, receive patient feedback, and bolster their brand with a focus on creating trust. By communicating with patients online, hospitals and physicians establish the foundation for a positive relationship. In addition to this, precisely targeted ads via social media platforms assist in personalized patient outreach.
According to a 2018 study, 80 percent of U.S. Internet users have searched for health information online, and 60 percent of social media users trust social media posts by doctors over any other group. By engaging and interacting on the social platforms that their patients frequent, health systems can revitalize their word-of-mouth referrals, improve communication, and provide better care by ensuring that patients continuously engage with the health system.The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare Essay
Of course, there is a negative side of this, HIPAA compliance. The risk of when patient information gets into the wrong data, and making sure patient sign consent, and by identifying their demographics information.
When the Covid19 started in March, due to quarantined doctors visit, and patient concern were only achieved via telephone, internet “Zoom”, e-mail, and video visits. These are the ways the patient conveyed with the providers regarding their health concerns. Nearly all of the patients favors visit via internet or telephone visits currently due to convenience and not subjecting themselves in the sick environment.The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare Essay
With the advancement of modern technology, social media is increasingly finding use in healthcare delivery and management. Health professionals including doctors, nurses and therapists have adopted social media to communicate with their patients and for health sensitization. Social media can benefit healthcare delivery in a variety of ways including fostering professional connections, patient and community education and promoting communication with patients and families. On the other hand, use of social media in healthcare exposes patients’ data to breaches and leakages creating confidentiality issues. Misuse of patient data results in serious career penalties for negligent medical professionals. Protocols have been established to oversee the use of social medial by health practitioners. The paper seeks to explore the recognized rules that regulate the use of social media, and its risks and benefits. Health professionals should utilize benefits of social media while adhering to confidentiality, privacy, and ethical guidelines for private or professional communications with respect to patient data. Under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as the acronym HIPPA, and passed by Congress in 1996, the Privacy Rule protects all individually identifiable health information held or transmitted by a covered entity or its business associate, in any form or media, whether electronic format, paper, or oral (Office for Civil Rights). The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare Essay
Social media has become an integral part of many healthcare organizations’ marketing and communications strategies. Across the United States, over 99 percent of hospitals have an active Facebook page – and an increasing number are also establishing a presence on platforms like Twitter and Instagram.
Social media is no longer optional. In order to engage with patients on the platforms they use the most, social networking and advertising are critical components of the overarching digital marketing strategy.
Let’s take a look at some of the benefits, challenges, and opportunities that social media presents in today’s healthcare landscape.The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare Essay
The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare
Social media opens up many opportunities for health systems. It allows organizations to build connections, share discoveries, and develop credibility as thought leaders. Through platforms like Twitter and Facebook, physicians and health systems are able to share relevant health alerts, receive patient feedback, and bolster their brand with a focus on creating trust. By communicating with patients online, hospitals and physicians establish the foundation for a positive relationship. In addition to this, precisely targeted ads via social media platforms assist in personalized patient outreach.
According to a 2018 study, 80 percent of U.S. Internet users have searched for health information online, and 60 percent of social media users trust social media posts by doctors over any other group. By engaging and interacting on the social platforms that their patients frequent, health systems can revitalize their word-of-mouth referrals, improve communication, and provide better care by ensuring that patients continuously engage with the health system.The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare Essay
Challenges and Risks of Social Media in Healthcare
HIPAA Compliance
HIPAA compliance is a paramount concern for all healthcare organizations, especially when it comes to social media. Specifically, health systems are hesitant that a published social media post may violate a patient’s privacy, or that social media may be another vulnerability for hackers or malware.
Fortunately for health systems, HIPAA has released a comprehensive list of social media guidelines that outline how to post information online without violating patient privacy. This primarily involves de-identifying patients by removing information like their name, date of birth, or insurance information. Keep in mind that hospitals can avoid HIPAA compliance concerns simply by getting the patient’s consent to be shared on social media.The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare Essay
Time Constraints
Physicians are typically fully booked every day – if they do have some free time, then hospitals are often quick to assign them last-minute appointments. Already, physicians are only able to spend about 15 minutes with each of their patients, which leaves them little time in the day for relevant social media posts.
Marketing teams can help support physicians by drafting social posts that just need approval. Or, to generate more original content, health systems may want to offer incentives to physicians who post quality content to their social media accounts on a regular basis.
Professionalism
Maintaining an air of professionalism is a concern for the entire healthcare organization, but physicians are exceptionally cognizant of how they are perceived online. Physicians may be concerned that colleagues or patients will lose respect from them if they share inaccurate information, or fear that they may end up at the center of a controversy.The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare Essay
However, if all posts are appropriate and relevant, controversies are unlikely to occur. For additional guidance, healthcare professionals should adhere to The American College of Physicians and the Federation of State Medical Board’s guidelines for healthcare professionals in addition to all legal guidelines. If necessary, health systems should monitor all connected social media pages, and be ready to block or immediately resolve concerns with exceptionally negative users.
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Let’s look at how healthcare organizations should leverage the power of social media:
Healthcare Social Media Tactics
Promote Healthcare-Specific Networks
In this Internet-driven age, patients have a wealth of health and medical information at their fingertips: A quick Google search for rheumatoid arthritis, for instance, yields millions of results. In some cases, the best way to learn about coping with a health condition is by swapping stories and advice person-to-person on a forum.
One example of a patient-powered research network like this is PatientsLikeMe. Co-founders Jeff Cole and Ben and James Heywood set out to configure a way for patients to manage their own health conditions, changing the way the industry conducts research and improves patient care.
Cole and Heywood founded PatientsLikeMe based on the trial-and-error experience their brother went through during his fight with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). They wanted to connect with patients coping with ALS and track how they handle their own day-to-day care. Today, with over 600,000 members, their network has grown to include patients with a diverse range of diseases and conditions.The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare Essay
These patient-powered platforms utilize the enormous reach of social media to connect target groups with one another – and with reputable, capable health systems. On these networks and forums, patients can explore care methods, learn from one another, and freely share their experiences with various medical conditions and health systems.
Live Tweet to Educate Patientsusing social media in healthcare for heart bypass
A primary reason why healthcare organizations participate in social media is to help educate patients. They want to educate the public about innovative research and tips for staying healthy.
Frequent social media posting, like live-tweeting, provides numerous opportunities for education and engagement, boosts user authority and popularity, and works as a platform to showcase positive aspects of healthcare organizations.The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare Essay
In 2013, St. Vincent Charity Medical Center live-tweeted a total knee replacement surgery, in which over 3,800 people followed on Twitter and 3,000 over live-stream video and their hashtag #stvknee was a trending tag throughout the process. The following year, Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto live-tweeted a procedure for a heart bypass.
Include Hashtags to Engage in Conversations
To get the most out of their social media engagement efforts, we recommend leveraging relevant hashtags. Hashtags first became popular on Twitter, introduced as a way to link conversations and commentary on similar topics for simplified user search and popularity tracking. Today, hashtags are used on numerous social platforms – including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and others. patient engagement on social media
With the continuous flow and discovery of health information, hashtags offer both patients and physicians the ability to streamline their search across an entire social media platform. The utility of these hashtags is illustrated below by a volunteer organization, the Breast Cancer Social Media (#BSCM) Community. Using the hashtag, users can search #BSCM and access an entire world of support, guidance, and information – not just from fellow patients, but also the professional advice from clinicians and researchers.The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare Essay
To find hashtags that your health system can contribute to in a meaningful way, consult a hashtag database like Symplur. With this resource, healthcare organizations can find trending hashtags on conferences, diseases, research, and other generalized topics. This information can then be used to inspire social posts that reflect what patients are currently searching for.
Final Thoughts
There’s no question that patients use the Internet to take control of their own health. Health systems need to step up their social media strategy to reach target audiences, boost patient engagement, and improve health outcomes. Although health systems must overcome challenges around privacy, time constraints, and professionalism, social media offers too many benefits for health systems to ignore.The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare Essay
Technology, media and the internet has been having a huge impact in our lives since a long time now. But the sudden rise in social media usage has brought in much better and more advanced opportunities to business, marketing and general public awareness. The popularity of social media continues to increase and demographics show that the most growing users of social media are individuals aged 45-54.
Gone are the days when healthcare could only be provided through a practitioner by seeing them face-to-face. Physicians and health care practitioners can utilize social media to provide surplus information to other professionals in the industry in the form of research and awareness, as well as to patients who are seeking medical help.The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare Essay
Social media offers medical practitioners with tools to share more information, to discuss health care policies, to promote health awareness, to communicate with the public and to connect with patients, caregivers, students, and colleagues.
Patients can also rely on social media for moral and financial support from throughout the world in difficult times and can access information related to their health problems and learn about other patient experiences. In short, social media can serve as an effective means of communication for healthcare providers and patients.
Here are a few ways social media can prove to be beneficial in healthcare:The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare Essay
Crisis Situations
Social media has proved to be an extremely effective tool in times of crisis by providing information to consumers instantly. Hospitals and other healthcare organizations can easily update on hospital capacity, operation statuses and emergency room access through social media networks during natural disasters or disease outbreaks. A great example would be the time when a natural disaster had hit Japan in 2011. Twitter was actively utilized by doctors to update ill patients. Also, in 2009, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used social media networks to educate people about the H1N1 virus.
In addition to this, social media also lets healthcare professionals pass along information released by organizations such as the Red Cross, WHO, CDC or maybe even interact with television channels.
A recent Zika virus outbreak that originated from Central and South America and the Caribbean, is a mosquito transmitted virus that posed a huge challenge to health care providers in minimizing its spread. Healthcare organizations and practitioners faced a set of unique challenges as this was a lesser known disease.The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare Essay
It was vital to build awareness and preventive knowledge among health care practitioners and to the general public, including civilians residing in rural and remote areas. They needed to reduce the spread of misinformation related to treatment, risk factors and prevention.
Major health care authorities like CDC and WHO turned to social media networks like Twitter and Facebook to confront these challenges. They succeeded in rapidly communicating accurate health information to both the health care community and the public in general.
General Awareness and Medical Information
People have started using the internet as a means to diagnose themselves and seek help. While all the available information might not always be authentic, most of it still provides awareness to health problems because of which people rush to seek treatment before it’s too late.The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare Essay
Social media provides a prodigious opportunity for healthcare organizations to raise awareness about most sought-after health problems like diabetes, cardiac diseases, allergies and geriatric medicine. By broadcasting information that is fact-based and applicable, healthcare organizations can upgrade general health and well-being by providing effective precautionary measures and better lifestyle choices.
Patients who are looking for healthcare can search on social media for information on doctors, hospitals and specialists. Previous patients can provide reviews about their experiences and services on social media. All this knowledge can help you choose the right provider and care location.The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare Essay
Extensive reach by the practitioner
Social media is a great tool to widen your reach and expand your practice as a health care practitioner. A local doctor in a remote rural area may come across a patient with an unusual set of symptoms and may require the opinion of a specialist as soon as possible. Social media can serve as an effective way to communicate for physicians not only to expand their knowledge but also their professional medical network beyond geographical borders.The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare Essay
Doctors can share their researches and experiences and work collectively by accessing medical journals and scholarly articles through social media. It all comes down to making patient care more efficient.
An important thing to keep in mind is that if social media is not used with good judgment and under legal considerations, it can turn out to be a great threat to the practitioners credibility. The physician needs to be aware of their establishments rules for social media and also the current legal regulations before posting anything.The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare Essay
Peer Support
The whole idea of social media is to connect with people. When someone is going through a difficult time of disease, just knowing that there are a lot of people out there who have gone through the same or are experiencing the same problems, provides emotional support to the patient. Social support has been known to show positive health outcomes, with some studies showing that patient’s compliance and general health is enhanced when they get support from family and peers.
Social media networks offers forums for users to help clarify doubts and questions that are answered to them by peers or professionals. Many online campaigns have risen through social media and proven to be a huge success. Issues like smoking cessation and weight loss journeys have motivated people across the world through social media platforms to better lifestyle choices.The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare Essay
In addition to that, hashtag campaigns on twitter and facebook for organ donations and fund raisings have helped people go through treatments that wouldn’t have been possible without social media networks.
Furthermore, social media helps in opening conversations about mental health issues and sexually transmitted diseases which help to reduce the stigma of suffering from such medical conditions, as people with such diseases are usually driven out of fear and left to isolation.
Cost Effective
Social media sites can be effectively used for medical marketing and as a promotional platform at a lesser cost compared to other forms of media. They give a cost effective opportunity for monitoring and dispensing healthcare services.The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare Essay
Studies reveal that social media influences the image and visibility of a medical organization or hospital. A study showed that 57% of consumers were influenced by hospital’s social media presence and chose those organizations to receive health care. The strong social media image of the hospital appealed to 81% of consumers as as organization that offers cutting-edge technologies.The Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare Essay
