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:

• Stepped up our efforts on Twitter
• Created a FaceBook page for the portal page
• Made a few Videos
• Made some blogger outreach efforts

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.

5 Ways to Leave Yourself Open to Fraud or Theft without using Social Media

Last week I had coffee with a clinician who was in need of an overview on how social media might help with some education efforts that they are hoping to launch soon. Our discussion went well until he cut to the chase and explained that most of his interest was in iTunes U and the idea of developing an audio podcast series of their educational content. I explained that one benefit of this was that the information would now be portable for the convenience of the student. Not soon after, he asked the question... probably one of my most frequently asked questions.

Doesn't this leave us open to copyright infringement?

My answer was as it always is... probably, but you must decide if the benefits outweigh the risks. As you know I like to explain things in plain terms. I told him to equate it with the amount of risk you assign to a student loosing a notebook. Yes if the lost their iPod and your classroom content was on it, and for some reason it was found by a malicious person from a competing institution... yes then you might have a problem. But it would probably not be much different than the problem you would have if they lost a notebook.

Then this brilliant scientist said to me "But with the iPod they could copy and distribute our information right?" Have we all forgotten about the copy machine, or the scanner? If a person has malicious intent for your property they will find a way to obtain it and misuse it no matter where you put it.

This got me thinking about all of the other ways that we could be putting our information in jeopardy of fraud, theft or copyright infringement without using social media.

1 Throw your information into a garbage container - If a person wanted your bank, or billing, or credit card information, all they would have to do is dig through your trash after you drive a way unless, of course you are in the habit of shredding... everything.

2 Lose your notebook or calendar- What do you write down? Do you write meeting notes, or addendums to your schedule and whereabouts on a daily basis? Don't loose those bound pieces of paper they may leave you open for a transfer of TMI to someone without your best intentions at heart.

3 Place your photos in frame on your office desk - Do you have pictures of your children or friends just sitting out on your desk for the casual passer by to review. What is to stop them from stealing one, or scanning or copying them while you are out at a meeting? It would take a real sickko to do that right?

4 Post anything on your website or send it through e-mail - Every time you put your information up on the web Google takes a snapshot and keeps it in the archives forever. Check your website, does it contain anything that you would not want anyone to copy? With e-mail I have had my main e-mail account for almost 10 years, I have some oldie but goodie pictures, and notes from of people that then sent in 1999. Who owns those?

5 Carelessly allow yourself to become a victim of any kind of crime of theft - We all know someone who has been the victim of a crime. A broken into car or home, a stolen purse or wallet, or a credit/debit card number theft via gas station pump. Every time something like that happens there is a chance that more than just the surface information was stolen, and we know for a fact that those people are malicious.

I could probably keep going... Don't drink the water, don't eat the food, don't go outside... Everything that we do carries some kind of risk. Everyone has their own level of tolerance for these risks. I am just saying, don't discount the benefits of the digital and new media tools to distribute your message because of your fears of perceived risks. Research, understand and mitigate those risks with thought in how you use the tools, and understanding of what the risks really are.

The State of the Blog

As many of you know, one of the early projects that I was tasked with was development of a blog for the hospital. At the time this was sort of daunting, because there were only a handful of hospitals blogging, in any capacity. From the perspective of our institution on only a few of those were doing it well.

But I must give credit to blogs like this one http://sharing.mayoclinic.org/ and http://neuro-ortho.org/blog/ for helping me to make the case.

So I began the process of making a case for the blog, I wrote the beginnings of the guidelines documents while on vacation. Submitted the project to our IS new project cue for approval and assignment. Just in the past few months, I have begun to recruit bloggers, test layouts, and take my guidelines and work-flow concepts to our legal department.

I hesitate to report this because I feel that as soon as I do so, all "heck" will probably break loose. But the state of the blog project is good.

Other than the time that it took to make it to the table of the IT project review board, the processes has not as difficult as I imagined it would be. There have been very few heated discussions or disagreements. Most of the criticism has been absolutely constructive and has prompted me to go back, do a little more research and find creative solutions to gaps in the process.

I think the secret here is that people have been slow to warm to the concept, and our pace has allowed them to warm slowly. Also at no point has the project been half baked. We were careful to really spend the time thinking through all aspects of the project before we took it "public" There have been times that we did not have all of the answers, but those were all moments where I learned a bit more about the institution and the volumes of guidelines and standards we strive to adhere too.

I really believe that I am just a few months away from launching this project. Stay tuned...

Not Getting around HipAA

More than once, in the past few days I have been asked about how we" get around" HIPAA requirements in Facebook.

ex. dchstx @JennTex are you familiar with any HIPAA issues and social media, specifically use of images of friends/fans as profile pics?

The answer is we don’t.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act requires that we do not identify patients or their PHI without their express permission.

So we do not;

• Post images of people identified as patients on our Facebook page without a signed consent form. As you may notice we do not have very many pictures out there
• Allow wall posts from people who identify themselves as patients and then begin sharing their PHI with the audience.
• Allow patients to post images or videos to our pages

But the question has also been asked about the issue of fan photos in the page. I think it is wrong to assume that all of our fans are patients. Our fans consist of media, caregivers, employees, potential employees, and yes patients. Unless you choose to go to and click on every one of those fan profiles you most likely could not easily identify which are patients. Facebook also allows people to hide their profile information from the public if they choose. So you have to be a friend of that person to see any personal information about them.

PHI would only be compromised if they...

• Are a fan
• Are a patient, and identify themselves as such
  
• Are sharing PHI on their personal page
• Have not locked their page from the public

Facebook does offer these security features, but you must choose to use them.

I often try to draw comparisons to real life communications efforts when trying to understand and apply guidelines to our social media use. I equate this to a patient standing on our steps yelling their diagnosis and treatment plan out to the passing public. Short of kicking them off of our steps, how could we protect them futher? In that case we would have done our due diligence.

Recently I saw a video, on Youtube that a caregiver shot in our hospital, it was clearly our hospital. He was going to visit a family member, we saw his parking spot, his elevator ride, the room number he was visiting... Then he tagged the video with our name. That was really too much information. But my point is if they want to share their information they will do it, whether we exist on Facebook or not.

Supporting Social Media

This week our department /division just added a bit more weight to the social media communications program. The publications and public relations teams merged to become one large external communications team. While the merger overall means many more opportunities for collaboration and streamlining of content, it has also meant that our social media program just acquired and audio & video specialist. Whoopee!

In our first all team planning session it was made clear that Social Media was now going to be a part of everyone's communications efforts, and our new team was to be the support and training arm. Everyone would have to find opportunities to spread their content beyond just it's current audience, and quantify their growth with some type of measurement.

I wonder if this communication department structure might become more of the norm as the economy forces us to do more with less, and quantify our progress more accurately?