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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