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.

Hello everyone – I just finished an update to the big list. Please take a look and make sure your information is correct. It should have all submissions to date, but sometimes I miss a few.

The current numbers are 391 Hospitals total across:

194 YouTube Channels
203 Facebook pages
284 Twitter Accounts
44 Blogs

Full list here

Charts and Excel file here

Update – April 8, 2009

Please see this post for the latest charts - Twitter is now the leading hospital Social Media site

______________________

On Saturday, March 14, 2009,  I took a snapshot of Hospital social media activity. Using links from the big list, I  gathered the following data:

YouTube:

• Account creation date
• Number of Videos posted
• Number of YouTube Channel Views
• Number of Channel Subscribers

Twitter:

• Account creation date (first update)
• Number of Updates
• Number of Followers

Facebook:

• Number of Fans / Members

Here are some results. The original data is available as an Excel spreadsheet, please email me if you want a copy.

First, take a look at the adoption rate for YouTube and Twitter:

No surprises here, but it is interesting to see the rapid growth on Twitter. It took 26 months to reach 100 YouTube accounts, and 17 months to get the same number for Twitter. At this pace I expect crossover will happen in the next four to six weeks.

YouTube Statistics:

• There are 121 YouTube channels, with a total of 4,575 videos.
• The average number of videos per channel is 38, the median is 19
• The average number of subscribers is 28, the median is 11
• The average number of Channel Views is 1,736, the median is 629

Firsts and Mosts:

• First on board – The first Hospital Youtube channel was set up by the Arkansas Children’s Hospital on Sept. 13, 2006
  
• Number of Videos – Avera Health has 377 videos on it’s YouTube channel – more than anyone else.
• Number of Subscribers – M.D. Anderson Cancer Center leads with 575 subscribers
• Number of Channel Views – Cooper University Hospital leads with 24,383 views. This is interesting because the number was only 12,500 on Feb 2, 2009. Could it be Kelly Ripa?

Twitter Statistics:

• There are 103 Twitter accounts, with a total of 9,223 updates
• The average number of updates is 90, the median is 37
• The average number of followers is 294, the median 202

Firsts and Mosts:

• First on board – The first Twitter account was set up by St. Jude Children’s on October 23, 2007
• Most Followers – Henry Ford Health has the most with 1,489 followers
• Most Updates – Alegent Health leads with 1349 updates, almost three times more than the second most active account, @HenryFordNews

Facebook Stats:

Facebook doesn’t offer much for number crunching. You can’t even figure out when an account was created. The only stat I can track is the number of Fans or Members for a given account.

• There are 82 Facebook accounts, with the average membership of 821. The median is 163 – which tells you that a few accounts have some high numbers
• Most Fans / Members – Once again, St. Jude Children’s has the most with 33,252 fans

Want more? The original data is available as an Excel spreadsheet, please email me if you want a copy. Let me know if this is useful to you, and if there are any other statistics that we should follow.

While fun, these numbers don’t address the quality of the programs run by the 190+ hospitals tracked. And in Social Networking that counts for much more than sheer volume.  However, monitoring the growth has some value, and I plan to capture these snapshots at regular intervals (possibly monthly). In six months to year, we should have enough data to see trends.

A big update this week.

The list now follows 193 Hospitals on 121 YouTube Channels, 82 Facebook pages, 103 Twitter accounts and 20 Blogs.

New to the list:

Avera Health, Sioux Falls, SD on YouTube

Barnes-Jewish Hospital St. Louis, MO, on Twitter

Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chigaco, IL is on Twitter

Cooks Children’s in Fort Worth TX on Twitter

Le Bonheur Children’s Medical Center in Mephis, TN on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter

Mercy Hospital Medical Center in Des Moines, IA on Facebook

Northside Hospital, St. Petersburg, FL on Twitter

Sarasota Memorial Hospital, Sarasota FL on Twitter

St. Francis Hospital, Indianapolis, IN has a Blog and is on Twitter

St. Johns Hospital in Springfield, MO on Twitter

St. Lukes Hospital in Houston TX on Twitter

Siteman Cancer Center St. Louis, MO on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube

VCU Medical Center in Richmond, VA on Twitter

Washington Hospital Healthcare in Fremont, CA on YouTube

How Am I Doing?

Ranking lists have always been popular. The Billboard Top 100, The New York Times Best-Sellers Lists, and the Dave Letterman Top 10 List are just a few examples. It’s no surprise that after the Web took off in the mid-90’s, Web popularity tools came along that claimed to rank websites by traffic.

The most popular service was Alexa, which gathered data by offering a toolbar for Internet Explorer. Released in 1997, this toolbar offered functionality missing in early versions of IE, and was installed by hundreds of thousands of people across the Internet. In exchange for the extra features, the software tracked websites visited by the users and reported this information back to Alexa.

The quality of their data has always been criticized – just do a Google search on “alexa accuracy” for hundreds of articles on this topic. The primary problem is with low-traffic sites, which are the majority of sites out there. There’s just not enough sample data coming in for an accurate ranking.

In the past few years, competitors have appeared who use more advanced techniques for data gathering and analysis. The two services getting the most attention are Compete.com and Quantcast.com. 

Back in 2006 I decided to research these services in more detail. Using the hospital websites listed in U.S. News and World Report as a starting point, I tracked the rankings for each hospital across all three services. There’s still a noise issue. The top 20 hospital sites were pretty consistent across all services, but it gets more jumbled once you get down to sites with less than 100,000 monthly visitors.

Despite this, one service stood out. Quantcast.com had accurate numbers for all of my websites, even ones with only a few thousand visitors a month (See this example). Their data gathering combines panel measurement, along with raw ISP traffic logs from major service providers.  Their full methodology is detailed here (caution – lots of buzzwords)

Spot checks with the Web managers of a few dozen sites on the list confirmed that the Quantcast numbers were close – usually within 25% of the actual number. They also offer additional demographic data on site visitors, which makes it a good market research tool.

I continue to track hospital site rankings, and have expanded the list to include some of the large commercial and government medical sites. Now, however, the data comes from Quantcast alone.

You can access the data set in Google Docs

Quantcast data was checked on Feb 8, 2009, so it can be seen a snapshot of site activity. Obviously. the numbers change all the time, but over the past three years I’ve found most stay at a consistent level of traffic.  The spreadsheet has data on over 370 organizations. It also has links to the hospitals YouTube, Facebook and Twitter sites.

I welcome your feedback and comments. Let me know if you find this useful.

(note – this is an update of my article posted on webiscope.com in August, 2007)