Social Media in Healthcare

The use of social media in the world of healthcare is slowly gaining traction. And this will surely help: The Mayo Clinic has created a Center for Social Media at their Rochester, Minnesota headquarters, which will help them increase their own use of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, and certainly encourage other organizations to ramp up their usage as well.

            “Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic has launched a Center for Social Media, which aims to increase use of social media throughout the organization and encourage other hospitals to connect physicians and patients through tools such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports. Although the number of hospital Twitter accounts has doubled across the past year, the health care industry continues to lag behind other industries in its use of social media tools. Ed Bennett — director of Web strategy at the University of Maryland Medical System — said that only 15% to 20% of the nation’s 5,000 hospitals use social media. Mayo currently runs the most popular YouTube channel among medical providers, is tracked on Twitter by roughly 60,000 followers and connects with more than 20,000 users via Facebook.”

This is pretty meta, talking about social media on social media, but it’s cool to see one of the industry leaders jumping on the bandwagon and making a significant investment in SM, all with the goal of improving healthcare and healthcare experiences nationwide.