Sunday, November 04, 2012

Social media hospital usage compared

Our friend from Nijmegen, @lucienengelen, presents an infographic prepared by one of his colleagues about the use of social media in hospitals, comparing the Netherlands, the UK, and the US.  Tom van de Belt did this by crawling through the websites of hospitals in the same way an interested patient might do so.  Here's an excerpt showing the relative use of Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter:


No surprise on my part with this result.  US hospitals tend to be slower on the uptake of such tools.  Indeed, some even block the use of social media on their hospital servers!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yep. Our hospital is one of the blockers, but they do have a facebook page. Hm. What does that say?

Anonymous said...

It would be interesting to know if that graph parallels one showing incidence of health care related litigation in those countries. Not that that's an excuse.

nonlocal

e-Patient Dave said...

Anon,

> What does that say?

What it says is that the hospital has the old-school view of social media: it's a way to broadcast a canned message, not to listen and interact.

And that's missing 2/3 of the value.

(Mind you, I might be wrong - if they have someone whose JOB is to listen to social media, and if they allow comments and RESPOND candidly (not cannedly!) to comments on their FB page, then I'm wrong. Otherwise, I'm right.)

Anonymous said...

Dave, I think the answer is old school; I just checked the FB page. It is just the hospital promoting events, with a patient comment thrown in here and there.
The point of litigation is valid I think when you compare the countries. But I wonder if there is more too. I for one won't be adding our hospital on my FB friend list. Not that I dislike working there, but keeping work and friends separate.
(sorry for posting anonymous, google is not letting me sign in right now)