Hospitals Using Social Media To Engage With Community, Donors

Hospitals across the country are starting to leverage social media tools to communicate with patients, raise funds and connect with their local communities, Modern Healthcare reports.

About the Trend

Ed Bennett — director of Web strategy for the University of Maryland Medical Center-Baltimore — has collected data on hospitals’ use of social media over the past two years. According to data posted in January, 906 hospitals are active on six social media platforms. Bennett found that there are a total of 3,087 social networking accounts run by hospitals.

Hospital employees who work in communications say social media platforms help them learn what patients, physicians and business partners are saying about their facility. They say such feedback can help hospital administrators improve policies and processes.

Industry Examples

Some of the hospitals that have leveraged social media websites include:

• Children’s Hospital Boston, which has an active pediatric health blog, nearly 230,000 views of its YouTube videos and more than 450,000 followers of its Facebook page — the most of any hospital in the world;
• Texas Health Resources, a 13-hospital system that uses internal microblogging and video-sharing sites to engage physicians in the adoption of electronic health records; and
• The University of California-San Francisco Medical Center, which used Twitter, Facebook and the Facebook-based game Farmville to find new donors and raise $1 million for a new children’s hospital (Galloro, Modern Healthcare, 3/14).

Source: iHealthBeat

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