Experts have long warned that hospitals aren’t taking full advantage of what social media can do for their organizations, but in light of high consumer demand for features such as transparency and consumer-friendliness, the picture may be improving, according to MedCityNews.
Hospital leaders that have dabbled in social media engagement have, in many cases, been their own worst enemies when it comes to public relations--like in the case of Island Coast Pediatrics, a Fort Myers, Florida, practice that dropped numerous patients over comments in a closed Facebook group. And for other providers that genuinely want online patient feedback, there simply isn’t enough of it out there, Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, a health economist and patient engagement specialist, told MedCityNews.
“The evidence is that the mass of people are not using rating sites,” she said. “We do not have yet the be-all, end-all, whole enchilada to make it easy.”
The good news is, some providers are attempting to step up to meet the need. Last February, Boston Children’s Hospital’s public health surveillance initiative HealthMap launched CrowdClinical, which tracks patient feedback on platforms such as Reddit and Twitter. The tool processes the feedback and categorizes it to explore pathways to care improvement, according to MedCityNews.
The feedback aggregated by the tool is largely balanced between positive and negative, Boston Children’s Chief Innovation Officer John Brownstein said, in contrast to other services like Yelp, where it’s overwhelmingly positive and, in many cases, a better predictor of patient experience than federal surveys. Last year, Yelp expanded the services it offers for healthcare providers, teaming up with ProPublica to include average wait times.
What healthcare really needs, Sarasohn-Kahn said, is a solution that combines the best of existing resources in one place, such as the comprehensive accuracy of a service such as Healthgrades without the attached steep price tag. And as healthcare providers work to improve their transparency and feedback channels, even in dramatic ways such as Geisinger Health System’s money-back guarantee, that vision is increasingly close to becoming a reality.
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