I’m very excited to be heading down to Austin this March for two big conferences, South by Social Health and South by South West
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The latest Hospital Social Media update is live. We are currently at 557 Health System / Hospitals / Centers with 1090 social media listings:
- 254 YouTube Channels
- 336 Facebook pages
- 430 Twitter Accounts
- 70 Blogs
I’ve dug into the data and found some interesting results. The Social Media adoption rate is heavily skewed to larger hospitals. This graph shows a breakdown of hospitals by bed count:
The Social Media adoption numbers come from the 460 hospitals on my list that have publicly available bed counts. The U.S. bed count data is based on information from the 2010 Billian’s Health Data Blue book, and public data from the 2002 AHA survey. The total number of U.S. hospitals and bed count breakdown were remarkably close from both sources.
The disparity should not be a surprise. Smaller hospitals, like those with less than 100 beds, have less resources to invest in most outward facing services. There’s usually only one person responsible for everything – marketing, public affairs, media relations, web development, philanthropy, etc. No wonder social media isn’t a priority. In fact only 14% (65) of the hospitals on my list have less than 100 beds, and 86% (395) have more than 100.
So let’s do the math. Assume there are 6,000 US hospitals.
50% of them have less than 100 beds, so that leaves 3,000 viable hospitals
But don’t forget that social media is blocked at many hospitals. I don’t have solid numbers, but a 50% block rate feels right. I don’t expect employees to work from home in order to maintain their employers Social Media presence (though some do), so we are now at 1,500 hospitals.
In addition to the 395 distinct 100+ bed hospitals on my list, there are 82 Health Care Systems doing centralized social media. Let’s take a very conservative average of 5 hospitals per system. That equals another 410 hospitals in the social media space.
We are now at 805 hospitals out of 1,500 doing some sort of social media.
That’s a 53% adoption rate.
Not bad for a conservative industry like health care.
Of course we can do better, (opening up access is our biggest hurdle) – but I think it’s time to stop beating up on our industry.
Feedback is welcome, I encourage you to download the raw data and do your own analysis. Folks that find basic flaws in my numbers or logic are encouraged to contact me – I want to hear from you.
People that nit-pick irrelevant details or misuse this data will be ignored.
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This analysis of GDP consumption from Left Business Observer is intriguing. Has the popular storyline of reckless consumption been wrong all along?
“Everyone knows that American consumers have been on a binge for the last ten or twenty years. Data connoisseurs could even tell you that the consumption share of GDP rose from an average of 64% in the 1980s to 70% in 2007–8. But while the numbers are accurate, they’re not really telling the story of a binge. Much of the rise has come from spending on health care, not flat-screen TVs.”
I’m not an economist (IANAE?) and welcome other views of this data.
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Like most of you, I can scan an email and delete spam in less than a second. But sometimes one grabs my attention and I’ll read a few lines before it hits the trash.
This one fails on so many levels that I had to share:
To: (Our public webmaster address:)
Subject: Your Website www.umm.edu looking great
Hi Buddy,
I just visited your website and it is looking great
but i am surprised to see, it is not getting much
visitors through internet.
Do you know posting your website
in article directories, blogs, forums and
social bookmarking sites can increase
lot of visitors and it will boost you sales.
If you want i can help you for that,
as i have 5+ years experience in
internet marketing.
Waiting for your email.
Regards,
XXXXXX
_______________
Do you have a favorite spam email to share?
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The latest update of the Hospital Social Media List is out – and it’s a big one. It’s only been six weeks, but 79 new hospitals have been added. Here are the stats:
Category – Current Number (Number on Nov. 27, 2009)
- Hospitals doing Social Media – 540 (473)
- YouTube – 247 (218)
- Facebook – 316 (254)
- Twitter – 419 (356)
- Blog – 67 (57)
- Total # of Social Media Sites – 1,049 (885)
Click through to the list an you’ll find some other changes. I felt the old list was getting too large to be useful, so now each state has a dedicated page, along with a state Twitter feed. The main page also has sortable table, so you can quickly see who has the most Twitter accounts (Texas) or Facebook accounts (Illinois), etc.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting a series of updates from the twitter account @hospitalgroup – each update will link to one of the social media sites added in this update. This will get some visibility for the new hospitals.
What’s next:
I’m working a few additional changes.
1. In the next month or so, you may see the number of listings decrease. Social media sites that have not been updated in the past six months will be removed.
2. Look for a new feature – state level custom search engines. Just like the national hospital search but focused on the hospitals in a single state.
As always, I welcome your comments and suggestions.
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Our next interview with Deborah Braidic, who manages social media (and many other projects) at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles. She is responsible for a comprehensive program that includes Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Linkedin, and a wonderful Blog. Deborah maintains fresh and engaging conversations in these communities, and is great example for other Childrens Hospitals.
Please introduce yourself
I am Deborah Braidic, Web Content Manager, Childrens Hospital Los Angeles and I am delighted to be interviewed here on Found in Cache. I’ve been at Childrens for 4.5 years split about half and half between the fund-raising side of things and the web content side of things.
Tell us about your hospital and the department where you work.
Our hospital has got over a century under its belt as a center treating children and just over 3/4 of a century as an academic medical center affiliated with the University of Southern California. We treat roughly around 90,000 patients each year.
We make the unabashed claim in some places of having the highest ratio of medi-cal (medicaid) patients of any other comparable hospital in the nation. This makes us fanatically proud of our status of being listed as a U.S. News & World Report hospital.
What got you interested in social media?
I have to admit that our team was interested in social media and social networking for some time before we were permitted to approach the throne. And for a long time, we labored under the suspicion that they would probably never let us do it anyway.
You can imagine our delight when our CEO returned from a conference and wanted to know more about how social media might benefit the hospital.
We took the opportunity to put a proposal together and, to our surprise, it was accepted with a minimum of weeping and gnashing of teeth. I think what helped was that our VP of fund-raising stood up at our first “pitch” meeting and basically said “I think we would be stupid if we didn’t do this.” I think we owe a lot to that one comment.
What aspects of Social Media do you focus on for your hospital?
I would say that we focus on a little bit of everything at this point – we monitor our brand, we provide customer service outreach when called for, and we use the platforms to share “feel good” updates about our hospital and what is going on within our walls. For the most part, we attempt to keep our outgoing messages consistent with our overall branding.
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