MCSMN Blog

Mayo Clinic contributed four articles to the December issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology, which has a special focus on social media and strategy.

Here's a quick recap of the insights and innovations straight from the Mayo Clinic playbook shared in these articles. Click the titles to read them in full, or check out all of the related articles.

The Strategic Imperative for the Use of Social Media in Health Care

Given that word-of-mouth references continue to be a primary driver of patient referrals in health care, social media tactics have the ability to exponentially enhance this referral network by:

1. Generating Appointment Demand: The total number of social media referrals that led to appointment requests at our institution increased by 139% between 2015 and 2016.
2. Improving the Patient Care Experience: Mayo Clinic produced a patient-guide video series to illustrate how to navigate all three main campuses: Arizona, Florida, and Minnesota. These 25 videos received nearly 390,000 views since their creation in 2010 and 2011. The average percentage viewed is 84%, compared with 47% across all videos on Mayo’s YouTube channel.
3. Enhancing Health Consumer Education: Studies show online health care content is often created by nonmedical professionals, is of poor quality, and may contain inaccurate and misleading information. Health care institutions have a responsibility to provide reliable health information online.

The Social Media DNA of Mayo Clinic—and Health Care

Mayo Clinic began conducting brand research in the 1990s to assess consumer and patient inclination to consider Mayo Clinic for diagnosis and treatment of serious medical conditions. Two key sources emerged: news stories in traditional media and word-of-mouth recommendations from satisfied patients and referring physicians.

This led Mayo Clinic to approve a national media relations strategy which eventually grew to include social media. These tools enabled the media relations team to more effectively reach journalists while also helping medical specialists grow their practices by providing in-depth information directly to prospective patients.

The result? In Mayo Clinic’s first official year on Facebook, the page received 130 comments. In Q1 2017, posts on Mayo's Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest pages had more than 965,000 combined engagements, and specialty groups published to 62 Facebook pages.

The article also describes the origins and evolution of what has become the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network (MCSMN), and how it is consistent with the example of our founders, Dr. Will Mayo and Dr. Charlie Mayo.

Mayo Clinic Care Network: A Collaborative Health Care Model

Mayo Clinic developed an innovative, scalable care model to create and sustain relationships that benefit patients, foster relationships with like-minded partners to act as a strategy against the development of narrow health care networks, and increase brand awareness of Mayo Clinic. The result: Mayo Clinic Care Network (MCCN).

The MCCN allows regional health care systems to have routine access to an academic medical center without the cost and infrastructure of a merger-and-acquisition model. It allows a majority of patients to remain close to home and receive care by their local providers, even for complex medical issues.

How We Did It:

1. eConsults allow network physicians to connect electronically with Mayo specialists and subspecialists when they want additional input regarding a patient’s care.
2. Ask Mayo Expert provides point-of-care medical information compiled by Mayo physicians on disease management, care guidelines, treatment recommendations, and reference materials for a wide variety of medical conditions.
3. Mayo Clinic eTumor Boards give real-time access to providers of complex oncology care.
4. Health Care Consulting provides a customized, multilevel offering that addresses opportunities for operational and clinical improvement or enhancement.

MCCN member organizations also receive premium membership in MCSMN.

Social Media Scholarship and Alternative Metrics for Academic Promotion and Tenure

Social media and digital publishing platforms represent a new domain in academic medicine. Many institutions and scholars are using this space for the creation and dissemination of knowledge in areas such as branding, community outreach, medical education, and research.

What you Need to Know:

1. Alternative metrics represent article-level measures of scholarly product dissemination and impact in traditional print and online, as well as SM-based, publications. These altmetrics are being rapidly adopted by most academic journals, and they represent a new tool for the evaluation of academic value.
2. The use of SM scholarship and alternative metrics for academic assessment, promotion, and tenure is growing rapidly among scholars and is based on traditional frameworks for appraisal such as portfolios and standard definitions of academic quality.
3. Although initially slow to adopt, many academic and promotions committees are starting to consider SM scholarship and altmetrics for consideration of promotion and career advancement.

Taryn Offenbacher, a Communications Specialist at Mayo Clinic in Arizona, is a member of the Social and Digital Innovation Team. 

Tags: Case Studies, JACR, Social Media, social media tactics, strategy, Strategy, Tactics & Best Practices