Health Care Social Media Monitor

Whether you are a doctor in private practice, or a marketer for pharma or a hospital brand, see this infographic below as a reality check for you if you care about how your brand is perceived online.

This infographic presents case studies of four major brands on building and maintaining a strong online reputation – advice that is just as relevant to your healthcare digital marketing efforts.

Recently, Inspire passed a milestone: five million posts written by the patients and caregivers in our online health community.

The sheer volume of activity in the community—about three New York Times’s—worth of words written around the clock each day—makes it just about impossible to read every word, but we see certain themes stand out.

Here they are:

Patients want doctors to treat them as partners. Patients expect their doctors to listen to them not only about their symptoms, but also about their own perspectives on their condition. To be clear, patients don’t want to play doctor, but many patients—especially those with rare diseases—become highly educated about their condition and have done research which they believe bears consideration. The asymmetry of medical information available to patients versus doctors is almost gone, and today any one of us can go online to learn a great deal about a medical condition.

Patients are less cynical about pharma companies than you’d think. Patients want the medical system to work for them. They want pharma companies to make the drugs that help them and their loved ones. When we started Inspire, we were warned that patients would be overwhelmingly negative about pharma companies. This is simply not what we see. What we do see is a lot of discussion about how to optimize treatment, and a genuine interest among patients to best to benefit from their treatments.

Patients are not online just to vent. In our experience, patients seek three kinds of support: emotional, scientific, and practical. Many patients get scientific support from their physicians and online encyclopedic sources. But they are also hungry for practical information to improve their health, and they gather a lot of this information from their peers online. In two recent Inspire surveys—one of psoriasis patients, and another patients with the rare disease neurofibromatosis—each group said the primary reason they participated in online groups was to research the best available treatments. Emotional support and empathy are important, no doubt. But many patients share crucial practical information that only fellow patients know.

Patient communities aren’t 'soft.' The notion that patient-provided information is less important or valuable than physician-provided information is wrong. Different? Yes. Inferior? No. One only needs to spend ten minutes in our ovarian cancer group, for example, to immediately realize there is a great deal of knowledge and benefit being shared among patients 24 hours a day. This is in no way less rigorous or serious than traditionally authoritative sources of information. What is clear to us is this: patients who want to educate themselves about their health seek multiple sources of information, and they are smart enough to weigh those sources appropriately. To suggest patient-to-patient information about treatment options and decision-making is not as good as other kinds of support is patronizing and simply wrong.

Patients are generous. Patients, even some who are gravely ill, give of themselves in online groups in profound ways. It is clear to us that patients want to help one another, and in doing so, many discover they help themselves.

Background: Training for Australian general practice, or family medicine, can be isolating, with registrars (residents or trainees) moving between rural and urban environments, and between hospital and community clinic posts. Virtual communities of practice (VCoPs), groups of people sharing knowledge about their domain of practice online and face-to-face, may have a role in overcoming the isolation associated with general practice training.
Objective: This study explored whether Australian general practice registrars and their supervisors (trainers) would be able to use, and would be interested in using, a VCoP in the form of a private online network for work and training purposes. It also sought to understand the facilitators and barriers to intention to use such a community, and considers whether any of these factors may be modifiable.
Methods: A survey was developed assessing computer, Internet, and social media access and usage, confidence, perceived usefulness, and barriers, facilitators, and intentions to use a private online network for training purposes. The survey was sent by email link to all 139 registrars and 224 supervisors in one of Australia’s 17 general practice training regions. Complete and usable responses were received from 131 participants (response rate=0.4).
Results: Most respondents had access to broadband at home (125/131, 95.4%) and at work (130/131, 99.2%). Registrars were more likely to spend more than 2 hours on the Internet (P=.03), and to use social media sites for nonwork purposes (P=.01). On a 5-point Likert scale, confidence was high (mean 3.93, SD 0.63) and was negatively associated with higher age (P=.04), but not associated with training stage. Social media confidence was lower, with registrars more confident than supervisors for almost all social media activities. On a 5-point Likert scale, overall usefulness was scored positively (n=123, mean 3.63, SD 0.74), and was not significantly associated with age or training level. The main concerns of respondents were worries about privacy (registrar: 61/81, 75.3%; supervisor: 30/50, 60.0%) and insufficient time (registrar: 41/81, 50.6%; supervisor: 36/50, 72.0%). Using a multivariate generalized linear regression model, training stage and perceived usefulness were positively predictive, and concerns about privacy and time were negatively predictive of intention to use a private online network.
Conclusions: General practice registrars and supervisors are interested in using a private online network, or VCoP, for work and training purposes. Important considerations are the extent to which concerns such as privacy and usefulness may be overcome by training and support to offset some other concerns, such as time barriers. Participants at an early stage in their training are more receptive to using an online network. More senior registrars and supervisors may benefit from more training and promotion of the online network to improve their receptiveness.

The Front Porch Center for Innovation and Wellbeing, one of Southern California's largest not-for-profit providers of retirement living communities, teamed with New Jersey-based CareSpeak Communications, a mobile communications technology solutions provider, to pilot CareSpeak's mobile Health manager technology. The project featured customized texting services for medication alerts, diabetes and other chronic disease medication reminders, and medication tracking programs for seniors at Front Porch communities and neighboring senior centers.