• To maintain and increase your market share. At least some of your competitors have social media strategies in place and are refining them now
• Today's medical consumers are increasingly on-line using social media to research hospitals, doctors, and treatments. If you don't have a presence, they won't find you
• To build a loyal patient base that will continue to turn to your hospital for their healthcare solutions over the long-term
• To remain a preferred healthcare solution, you need to establish and maintain a leading presence in the relevant on-line social media conversations
• To monitor the conversations taking place on-line that can affect your hospital. Healthcare customers share their experiences, both good and bad, about your staff, physicians and services. You should now what they're saying.
• To help shape how competitive pricing and consumer ratings are measured and understood by your online consumers.
• To use the information available from your social media presence as the basis for conducting market research.
• To more effectively partner with your local public health and community providers and clinics to improve the public’s health, contain costs and respond to your community’s specific health needs.

Many of the functions related to how your hospital operates and relates to your customers will be changed.

These include:
Marketing, Customer Service, Clinical Education, Physicians, Infection Control, Patient Safety, Community Relations and Outreach, Discharge Planning and Clinical Centers of Service Excellence.

For Hospitals

• Becoming the trusted medical information resource in your community
• Distinguishing you as the Provider of Choice
• Attracting new patients
• Reducing long-term health-care costs through better education to a broader audience
• Providing key intelligence and knowledge about your patients for strategic planning and care management
• Managing risks by being part of the on-line conversations about your hospital. It’s a simple, inexpensive way to manage care and catch problems quickly – then resolve them before they get out of control
• Improving times for effectively responding to consumer/customer unique demands to demonstrate quality performance, provide transparency to your organizations’ patient safety and performance quality scores.

For Patients

• Getting access to your quality care and performance measures
• Being able to take more active roles in their healthcare
• Being able to control their medical issues on their time - when they need it - 24/7 from their living rooms, places of work, or anywhere else they can get an internet connection.
• Getting all of their information, tools to manage care and track successes, and event sign ups in a single location
• Facilitating communications with your hospital before, during and after hospitalizations or procedures can lead to improvements in their long-term health outcomes
• Enabling on-line communications with other patients – getting opinions and references from those they trust – finding others facing their same health issues - and sharing their fears, pains, and solutions.
• Getting on-line support helps family and caregivers better cope with their stresses
• Getting easier access to information that can help them recognize symptoms and take action before they become serious or complex. This reduces ER visits or complex hospital stays
• Having better access to information for controlling and preventing chronic diseases such as diabetes, obesity and smoking.

For Physicians and Staff

• Giving them a way to distinguish themselves from others by showcasing their expertise and showing themselves as individuals
• Providing an open vehicle to communicate with patients
• Enabling on-line collaboration lets them increase quality of care and offer patient support.

• Social media tools and platforms don't connect with hospital health information systems, and so don't contain any personal health records
• Patient privacy will be governed under the hospital’s policies and HIPAA regulations; such that healthcare providers are prohibited from posting any content that is protected health information. (Patients – anonymous)
• Upon registration, all members agree to the ‘terms of use’ policy which contains a link to your hospital's Patient Privacy Policy and any posted sections of HIPAA
• The hospital can monitor, pull or censor all content posted by members. The hospital can also disable users.

We recommend implementing and enforcing a policy around the use of the social media site to address these issues.

Some important points to include are:

• Hospital employees will only provide general medical advice if working as official representative of the hospital – and assigned to do so.
• All information posted needs to follow the same guidelines and policies for posting information to your website, or to other social media sites.
• During sign-up process, a ‘Disclaimer’ is posted that patients must accept prior to signing up.

• We can match your organization’s goals with the social media opportunities that reflect your values and strengths.
• We can develop your team’s strategic vision to incorporate social media into your clinical operations, community outreach and marketing strategy.
• We can formulate a strategy that minimizes your organization's risks while maximizing your social media.

If you haven’t already done so, we’d encourage you to watch the short video and view the executive whitepaper.

To arrange a meeting with one of our social media healthcare experts:

• Email us: sales@myhealthcommunity.net
• Call us: 603-553-2997

As a member of your local hospital's MyHealthCommunity, you get locally relevant health care information, including:

• Forums with medical experts from your hospital
• Access to online groups of people in your area who share your interests
• Calendar of upcoming events that you can participate in
• Blogs by your local clinicians and other community members
• Topic-specific Newsletters from your hospital's staff.

You will also be able to access:

• Health tools
• Medical information databases
• Health-related articles from nationally-syndicated sources

And all of this is available to you free of charge.

Anybody can join MyHealthCommunity by going to our Registration page, filling out the short form, and clicking the Join button.

If your hospital does not show up in the Search for Member Hospitals search results, you can fill out and submit the Tell Us about Your Hospital form.

We will then let your hospital know of your interest.

Please email sales@myhealthcommunity.net for more details.

The following features and items are included in the delivery and installation of each MyHealthCommunity platform:

• Customized suite of social media applications
• Gallery of Images for On-site Use
• Integrated Management Console
• Pre-loaded Social Media Content
• Saas - Turn-key installation
• Syndicated Article Feeds
• Training and Support

Please view our Benefits page.

An image used to represent a user. Avatar images include default silhouettes of heads, personal photographs, and drawn images of fantasy characters.

A contraction of web and log. A blog is a "site" on which an individual (author) can post regular entries. Typically entries consist of commentaries or observations. Blogs can be viewed by other users, who are able to post comments on each entry.

An on-line discussion group on a main area of interest. A forum contains one or more separate threads, or "conversations". Individual contributions to conversations are called posts.

Also "user group", a place on the web where people with common interests can exchange information with each other.

Each group can function like a mini-site within the main site; having its own membership list, blogs, calendar, media gallery, and so on.

The use or re-purposing of (mostly) Web 2.0 tools to help personalize health care by: fostering communications and collaboration within and between various groups - doctors, patients, hospitals, etc.; generating content by users; and promoting health education.

Strictly speaking, a series of digital media files (Audio or Video) released episodically and downloaded through web syndication. For our purposes, we also include other methods of accessing media files over the Internet, such as simple download or streamed webcasts.

Software as a Service - a model of software deployment in which the provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand. Advantages to customers include: low cost of training, no need to purchase hardware or secondary software, and no need to maintain databases or deal with software upgrades.

Web 2.0 applications that allow one-to-one and one-to-many communications between users on the Web.

A collective term for applications that enable users to provide content to websites - without the need to understand the underlying CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and XML technologies. Some examples are Wikipedia, blogs, RSS feeds, forums, and Twitter.