Social Media for Healthcare

HouTx, BSN, MSN, EdD · Sep 20, 2013

I'm assuming you are referring to a "patient portal" type of function. If not, please disregard my comments.

In my organization, this is multi-disciplinary effort. The initial effort (few years ago) was driven by the Physician Services folks - interested in tracking and managing referrals & physician relationships with the organization. Physician feedback indicated that they wanted more features, so IT was called to the table because their expertise was needed to connect credentialing services & EHR to the portal. Marketing realized what was happening, and since they are responsible for the external 'face' of of our organization, they pitched in with improvement of the interface along with customization to meet the needs of all of our regions & facilities.

Somewhere along the line, 'they' (people involved in the ongoing project) decided that there should be some type of process to ensure that patient educational materials were appropriate & factual (duh), so educators were invited to join the party. As the corporate leader for clinical education, that is where I came in. By this time, the project had been active for a couple of years. I am part of Nursing Services, so (of course) we proceeded to align with the other clinical group (physicians) and move things along the way we wanted them to go - LOL.

At this point, we are primarily using our patient portal as a way for patients/families to obtain information about their health management & contact physicians. They can also manage their own financial accounts & pay bills. Our marketing folks also send out targeted information about health care updates & such unless the recipient has opted out of this feature. We hope to add some self-scheduling features soon but that has come up against some significant resistance from our imaging & lab folks. There has been talk about converting our pt sat surveys to online, but a lot of resistance here also due to the small number of patients (thus far) who have indicated that they prefer online correspondence over snail mail.

We are now beginning to see some forward-thinking physicians becoming more engaged - using the pt portal to reach out to specific patient populations. Maybe online support groups are next?? But all of this requires resources to maintain, and since it is early days yet, we cannot really determine its "value" in terms of reimbursement -- so I doubt whether any additional funding is going to happen until we have a better sense of what is going to happen as a result of Health Care Reform.

I think there are a universe of wonderful possibilities in this area.... BUT (great big BUT) they are not going to happen until organizations have a clear financial incentive to make the investments that are needed. My advice? Get to know the marketing, physician services & IT folks very well. They are probably already tied into organizational funding streams that will benefit you if you can successfully align with them.