A Social Media Presence for Your Practice: Why, How, Now

Recognizing that he had some hard, social media-phobic cases from the baby boom generation in the room, C. Matthew Hawkins, MD, pediatric interventional radiologist, Emory University Hospital, Atlanta, and widely acknowledged social media expert, first tried to set his subjects at ease.

“I am not going to tell you that all forms of our communication will move to an asynchronous form,” he began. “I promise not to tell you that if you want to pick up the phone and call someone, you are old. I don’t believe that.”

In exchange, he asked the radiologists gathered at the annual meeting of the California Radiological Society in Newport Beach in October to recognize that social media is more than a post about a Katy Perry concert, what they had for dinner or how to get around talking face to face. Social media is about the way people are changing how they communicate, Hawkins asserts.

In a 30-minute talk, Hawkins provided compelling evidence for why attendees should have an online presence and advice on how to build one. Pointing out that most physicians already have an online presence, Hawkins suggested that with some attention, physicians can control what patients find.

“People will absolutely Google you,” Hawkins assured. “What would you do if your child was going to see a pediatric radiologist? You would Google him or her. Everyone of my patients knows how old I am, they know I went to Michigan State for Medical School, trained at Cincinnati Children’s and Seattle Children’s. They know it all.”

Google Hawkins and his LinkedIn profile, Twitter account and Doximity profile are listed. This is all content he created, giving him some control over his personal brand. What doesn’t show up on the first page is a Yelp review.

“I don’t do anything on Doximity, I just have a profile, but that pops up when people search me,” he said. “By having a social media presence, and you don’t have to be terribly active, you can begin to develop what patients find when they look you up.”

Beyond marketing

Aside from personal image control, social media has significant potential to improve patient communications. Hawkins pointed to a man from Roswell, Ga., who tweeted him just months after he left Cincinnati Children’s to move to Emory University. He asked if Hawkins treated vascular malformations, a procedure his son needed. “This shows how fast things can happen when you have a social media presence,” he said.

A 2013 survey published by the now-defunct American Medical News reported that 85% of adults were on the Internet, and 72% of them used it to search for health information. Back then, 24% of U.S. adults posted about their health and 27% posted reviews about medical experiences.

“Another reason we need to be online and have a social media presence is so that we can begin to create the content patients will find when they are searching about medical information,” he said.  Hawkins maintains that it’s no longer good enough to provide medical information for patients, which they likely already have. What they want from physicians are their opinions and interpretation of that information.

Hawkins cited the book by Bob Pearson, Pre-Commerce: How Companies and Customers Are Transforming Business Together. “Human beings are now searching for information about a product or service well before they actually engage with it,” Hawkins said. “And they are not just searching the service or product’s web site, they are seeking peer opinions. Opinions are being formed about a product or service before you engage with it.”

This has changed the way patients engage with everything from an automobile purchase to the office visit. “Patients would walk into your office and you would have an opportunity to make a first impression,” Hawkins said. “That’s gone.”

Of course, you could make a good impression online, and then reverse it in person, Hawkins acknowledged. “But it’s pretty hard to recover if they don’t have a good opinion of you before you show up,” Hawkins said. “As a pediatric IR, the parent of my patients are in their 20s and 30s.”

The social networks

Part of the power of social media is the networking capability with both physicians and patients. “Some of the people I’ve been able to talk to and the resources that I’ve found have been just tremendous,” Hawkins said. “Not only is it good for me, there are people on the other side looking for information. These networks are huge now.”

Patients. Patients are particularly active on social media. “They want to find other patients with the disease and doctors who treat it,” Hawkins said. “They want to find hospitals that take care of it or that have established service lines to treat these illnesses.”

Patient advocacy organizations. Hawkins also has had some excellent exchanges with patient advocacy organizations on social media. “I had a wonderful exchange with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation a couple of years ago,” he shared. “It is really trying to improve the health information that patients can receive through social media.”

Health policy experts. Social media provides an opportunity to impact the health policy discourse around the Medicare Access & CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015, as well as legislation at the state and local level. “The people that are writing the opinion pieces that are impacting this legislation, they are all online,” Hawkins said. “They are all on social media.

Hawkins emphasized that it is possible to follow topics, not just people, on Twitter. Hashtags, a pound sign with a jumble of letters or words, makes a piece of social media mineable and searchable, he notes.

In 2015, Hawkins worked with other radiologists active on social media to devise a radiology hashtag-ontology available at http://www.symplur.com/healthcare-hashtags/ontology/radiology. “We wanted to give radiology a social media language that we could include in our social media content so that years from now, we could go back and mine these data,” he reported. “It’s exciting to see how it has taken off. If you do start posting about radiology topics use this to make your content searchable.”

Twitter is tracking 889 U.S. radiologists who posted about 167,000 tweets in 2014. “Companies tracing this information are selling it to vendors and hospitals and other companies that are interested in what docs are saying online,” he noted.

If you do decide to open an account on Twitter, don’t expect your tweets to go viral. “Everybody thinks their tweets are going to go viral,” he said. “People have studied this, it will not go viral.”

Hawkins cited the 90:9:1 rule: 90% of the people on social media just consume by clicking on links; 9% share; 1% generate the content. “I think it’s probably closer to 75, 20 and 5, now,” he said.

The takeaway is that you still have to communicate on a personal level, Hawkins suggested. “You have to communicate to your patients. It’s still about personal relationships on social media. We really could discover ways to become more patient centered by using some of these technologies.”

@CincyKidsRad

The Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center radiology department was an early adopter of social media. Its experience provides an instructive case study for others wanting to implement a program.

“We started with a mission statement,” Hawkins shared. “It helped focus our efforts and the objectives of what we are trying to achieve.”

Its mission statement encompassed what they wanted to talk about and with whom: “The CCHMC Radiology department’s social media presence will serve as a medium for information dissemination regarding pediatric radiology to all members of the public, increase the departments worldwide exposure, and establish our status as the world’s leader in quality, safety, informatics, academics, and patient care in pediatric radiology.”

“If I was trying to build a private practice, I would probably want to focus on the local population and news stations,” he noted. The department began with a blog that it continues to maintain, but first established the following infrastructure.

Content committee. Leave this up to physicians, and it won’t happen, Hawkins advised. A group of mainly nurses and technologists outlined the content strategy and came up with one month of content before the blog was launched, including:

• how we do it, MR enterography, for instance (one post per week)
• research presented at conferences (one post per week)
• what makes us different, why (once per week)
• meet the team (one post every two weeks), and
• patient stories (one post every two weeks).

Governance committee. This committee included more physicians and practice leadership, and dealt with issues such as how to handle a patient posting personal information on the blog or an angry customer. You can’t not allow comments, but you have to monitor these things,” he said. “We had to come up with how we were going to approach those before they happened, and who we were going to go to when they did.”

Tips and caveats

The team also discussed how to structure the content, and decided, for instance, to limit posts to 300 or 400 words. YouTube videos—and Hawkins strongly suggests leveraging this second-largest search engine in the world—should be no longer than three to four minutes.

Local politics also must be considered. When the team approached the hospital marketing staff, it encountered some resistance. The primary problem was that hospital marketing wanted the blog to reflect the hospital’s brand in its design.

“Make sure you work with your hospital marketing and PR people,” he said. “Don’t just do it and ask for forgiveness later. If we had done that, they would have shut us down.” By working with marketing, radiology was able to maintain control over the content.”

A social media strategy requires daily management. Cincinnati Children’s hired someone to do this. “If your practice employs a physician and expects the physician in their free time to maintain a social media presence, it will fail,” he assured.

Cincinnati Children’s social media strategy includes a YouTube channel, Twitter and Instagram accounts and a Facebook page. “You use these to drive traffic to the blog,” he said.

He shared a video of a pediatric radiologist explaining what MR enterography is, what information it provides, patient preparation and experience and how many procedures the department performs a year. “That’s not going to go viral, but if your kid is going to have an MR enterography done at Cincinnati Children’s, will you have a better or a worse idea of what is going to happen to their kid?” Hawkins asked.

In conclusion, Hawkins emphasized that social media is not about the technology, it is about how it has changed the way that people communicate. “As we move forward to improve our patient centeredness, we need to continue to work as individuals in our groups to embrace social media,” he advised.