If you are in an executive position at a hospital or healthcare system, consider blocking access to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. There's no better way to let the world know that you neither trust your employees, nor promote knowledge sharing.
If there were any lingering questions about the reach of social media, they were put to rest a more than a year ago when Tweets started coming from space.
NASA's @MarsCuriosity sends daily updates on its activities and shares photos, data, and other links with its 1.3 million followers. This week Curiosity is marking its one year-anniversary on the planet. Its official Twitter stream is a fantastic resource for anyone interested in NASA, space exploration, and the hard sciences.
But NASA has a rogue 'employee,' one @SarcasticRover, who also tweets. He's a bit of a disgruntled goofball who gripes about being left on the red planet to do NASA's dirty work. Typical tweet: "A year ago I was stuck hurtling through space in a tin can alone and terrified… a time I refer to as the good old days." And this: "Great, 1 year and 100,000,000 miles and I'm still stuck in a damn crater."
You never know what @SarcasticRover might blurt out next to his 109,000 followers (some of them NASA employees). And that makes him a potential (albeit fictional) liability. Maybe NASA should have banned social media altogether.
Of course, it's too late for that now. But it may not be too late for your hospital or health system to forbid the use of social media. In fact, you should consider blocking Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, because there's no better way to let the world know that
- You don't trust your employees
- You don't care about patient experience
- You don't promote knowledge and information sharing
- You aren't willing to train employees on the right way to use social media
1. You don't trust your employees
At the University of Maryland Medical System, largely for security concerns and bandwidth issues, the IT department decided to ban social media networks system-wide in 2005, according to Ed Bennett, the health system's director of web and communications technology. In 2011, UMMC lifted its workplace ban, but during those six years, they learned some interesting insights into how the earlier decision impacted its employees and its patients.
When UMMC surveyed patients about its ban on social media, here's one response that stood out: "You trust your staff with my life, but you think they can't handle Facebook?"
"We have a culture of respect at UMMC, and we view our workers as professionals who we trust our patients' lives with, so we couldn't be sending the message that we don't trust them on social media," says Bennett.
Like UMMC, Baylor Health began to block social media in 2005 during the rise of MySpace. Leadership was fearful of the powerful draw of social media and its implications on productivity and patient privacy, says Howland.
"We're living in an age of transparency, and blocking social media is a sign of distrust that doesn't sit well," says Ashley Howland, social media manager at Baylor Health.
Howland recently participated in a HealthLeaders Media webcast about building an appropriate and measurable social media strategy, where she discusses employees being ambassadors of a brand's message. "[Unblocking social media] is a statement for employees that you trust them to use these tools responsibly."
2. You don't care about patient experience
"The fastest, simplest way to stay close to everything you care about," –Twitter
By blocking social media, healthcare organizations also ban patients from everything they care about. That's not a positive message for an industry that is increasingly more focused on patient experience, and it could send patients to a nearby competitor.
"Our guest Wi-Fi access went through our same network, so visitors and patients were facing the same blocking as employees were," says Bennett. "That was a big patient dissatisfier when we did surveys, and it was also a big motivator to make the switch. Our patients demanded it, and at these vulnerable moments in their lives, they needed it to connect with their support system."
"You cut off my support network with I needed it the most," read one response UMMC received from a patient.
Within three months of lifting the social media ban, UMMC nurse practitioners set up several patient support groups inside Facebook groups for transplant patients, patients with traumatic injuries, and extreme digestive disorders. These were previously face-to-face groups, says Bennett, but social media has expanded their reach.
3. You don't promote knowledge and information sharing.
"Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected," – Facebook.
Social media provides a great tool for collecting information and sharing knowledge. By denying your employees access to these networks, you also send a message that it's not important for your employees to be a part of a more connected world.
When Baylor Health's marketing department began to roll out a social media campaign in 2010, it pushed for relevant employees to have access, and made the successful push in 2011 to have the ban lifted for all employees.
"We look at it that we wouldn't block these tools any more than a phone," says Baylor Health's Howland. "You treat it like any other communication tool. For companies that want to be forward thinking and innovative, blocking social media doesn't fit with that message. If it's employee productivity a company is worried about, there are plenty of ways an employee can waste time on the Internet that isn't Facebook. So that's a managerial issue, not a social media issue."
4.You aren't willing to train employees on the right way to use social media
Training should inform and educate employees on all angles of social media behavior, from how to interact with the company to building a good profile to patient friend requests. Just like training for a new technology or safety program, set up scenarios for employees and provide answers proactively to the questions you know will arise.
"Fundamentally there is nothing new about social media when it comes to these policies," says Bennett. "Every rule you've already been following already, they also apply to social media. Be sensible and behave. If anything comes up, it's extraordinarily rare, we look at what is the context because there can be a lot of times where the employee had no idea that what they were doing could be seen in a different light. A lot of it is about education about the grey areas. This falls into the areas of understanding professionalism—how you portray yourself and the organization."
"It takes courage to say there is a risk and possibility of something bad happening, but the benefits outweigh the risk, and the risks can be mitigated by having policies and putting in training," says Bennett.
Chelsea Rice is an associate editor for HealthLeaders Media.
