Frequently Asked Questions about the Hospital Social Network List

When was the data collected?
The initial data was collected in December 2008, but the list continues to grow.

Who did the research?
It was a joint project between myself, Edward Bennett,  and David Ekrem, Manager, Web Development at the MassGeneral Hospital for Children.

Why are you doing this?
Social Networking is a fundamental change to how the Intranet is used, a shift that will increase in the future. Hospitals that use the web for marketing and communications will need to adapt to these changes. This list monitors the leaders in our field.

Why did you choose these three services?
Facebook and YouTube were chosen because of their popularity. Given dozens of possible options,  it’s more likely that a Hospital would use one of these two established sites. But new services are gaining ground, and Twitter was added for that reason.

What was the methodology?
The research in two phases.

Phase one: Benchmark top hospitals – We took the 2008 U.S. News best hospitals list, which yielded 210 individual hospitals, and searched for each one on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.  We used a combination the internal search engines and Google to search for the hospital by name. We checked name variations, abbreviations, common usage, etc.

This gave us baseline data for these institutions.

Phase two: Expand the list to include all hospitals. We broadened the search to find any U.S. hospitals with accounts on the social networking sites. Search strings like “hospital”, “medical center”, ‘health system” were used and we found dozens of additional listings.

This is not a definitive list of all U.S. Hospitals.
It’s only the ones we know about.

What do you mean by Official Hospital Presence?
This was a challenge. None of these sites check credentials, and anyone can set up an account under a hospitals name. We didn’t find any fraudulent accounts, but many are set up by grateful patients, or other individuals with a relationship to the hospital. The goal is to include only accounts that are backed by a person or department who can “speak” for the institution. This would include the hospital webmaster, public affairs or marketing department, among others. Ultimately, the decision was left to our best judgment, based on what we could determine from the content. We welcome corrections and updates.

Hey – you missed my Hospital!
Please let me know if  your hospital was missed and it will be added to the list – the update process is described here