Friday, April 3, 2009

Supporting Web Savvy Physicians

with Web Portals & Social Media Communications

I am not a physician, however I do work with them. From what I gather, they are people who enjoy ease and convenience as much as anyone. If they are comfortable with technology then they are not adverse to using it to improve their practice. The hospital that I work for has a physician portal that assists physicians who have chosen to refer their patients to our specialists.


The portal enhances continuity of care and reduces referring physician workload by offering

- Faster referral processing
- Access to transcribed reports
- Single point of contact for patient information
- Access to more data & more reports on their treatment

and they are even working on bringing EMR access to the portal in the next few weeks.

We thought that the physicians that use social media might be the same physicians who are comfortable with technology and using it to help them in their daily tasks. So as a work group project, a few of us decided to try and implement a communications plan, with a heavy social media emphasis. Our hope was that if we could raise awareness of the portal among "those physicians" we could in turn use the robust analytics that social media and web analytics provides prove the impact of social media communications in the business of health care.

So we:

I really believe that this type of honest 2-way communication between hospital and community physician can benefit both parties. Soon we will be collecting the data behind the project and let the analytics tell the story. I will be sure to let you know how it all turns out.