When I was on Twitter yesterday, I learned from Craig Gagnon, a fellow healthcare marketer and member of the Healthcare Marketing (#hcmktg) Twitter Group, about this great article by Pamela Lewis Dolan of American Medical News on the subject of Twitter in healthcare. Specifically, Pamela’s article discusses early physician adopters and their use of Twitter. This topic has received a lot of attention of late, even in mainstream media, but Pamela’s article takes a nice, broad look at the subject, while bringing the reader along with educational points. The article even ends with a ‘Twitter 101′ addendum. This would be a good article to share with c-suite folks within hospitals who are still struggling to understand social media, and Twitter in particular.
“Doctors who keep tweeting stick around because they find it can be useful. Physicians most often use Twitter as an extension of their Web presence, a patient communication site, a marketing tool or a virtual water cooler with their colleagues. Or, maybe a combination of all four.” (Source: Pamela Lewis Dolan, American Medical News, June 29, 2009.)
The article introduces the reader to Dr. Wesley Young, an emergency physician in Honolulu who uses Twitter. Dr. Young has already had patients select him because they recognized him from various social media sites. And he feels that this is just the beginning – “a foreshadowing of things to come.” Imagine, you can grow your medical practice by building a following via social media. How does that change the way people look at Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Blogs?
Another physician, Dr. Peter Beck Kim, a family physician from California, plans to use Twitter to communicate with patients who want that kind of interaction. He’s doing this in large part because he sees more and more of his patients using smart phones to send messages and visit the Internet.
But Twitter does have its limits in terms of the length of messages one can send and the obvious privacy issues that come into play in healthcare.
“Physicians tend to gravitate to other physicians in most social networking mediums, and Twitter is no exception. But there are few curbside consults here. Besides the obvious privacy issues related to posting on a very public forum, there’s limited dialogue opportunity within the 140-character limit. What you often find is the virtual version of office banter and the occasional sharing of links to useful resources.” (Pamela Lewis Dolan, American Medical News, June 29, 2009.)
Check out the article online at http://tinyurl.com/mpbzrf.
Note: The illustration (above) that accompanied the article was created by Jashar Awan at http://jasharawan.com.
Post by Dan Dunlop, The Healthcare Marketer
