Mayo Clinic Launches Center for Social Media

The Internets and blogospheres were buzzing recently about The Mayo Clinic's announcement that it is launching a Center for Social Media at http://socialmedia.mayoclinic.org/. They even open with an embed of the Social Media Revolution 2 video that you may have seen somewhere before...

Here's a description of the center, quoted directly from the Mayo Web site: 

"The Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, a first-of-its-kind social media center focused on health care, builds on Mayo Clinic’s leadership among health care providers in adopting social media tools, which began with podcasting in 2005. Mayo Clinic has the most popular medical provider channel on YouTube and more than 60,000 “followers” on Twitter, as well as an active Facebook page with well over 20,000 connections. With its News Blog, Podcast Blog and Sharing Mayo Clinic, a blog that enables patients and employees to tell their Mayo Clinic stories, Mayo has been a pioneer in hospital blogging. MayoClinic.com, Mayo’s consumer health information site, also hosts a dozen blogs on topics ranging from Alzheimer’s to The Mayo Clinic Diet.

Mayo has also used social media tools for internal communications, beginning in 2008 with a blog to promote employee conversations relating to the organization’s strategic plan, and including innovative use of video and a hybrid “insider” newsletter/blog. This employee engagement contributes to Mayo Clinic being recognized among Fortune magazine’s “Best Places to Work.”

The center will accelerate adoption of social media for health-related purposes, starting at Mayo and then within health care more broadly. Through this work, Mayo Clinic looks to help improve health literacy, health care delivery and population health worldwide."

So why would Mayo spend the time, effort, expense, and resources on social media? According to them, the impetus came from within Mayo itself, as well as from their patients. The Wall Street Journal health blog had a nice excerpt from some Q&A they did with the folks at Mayo. In addition, Fierce Healthcare had a nice article about it as well. Critics, however, have denounced it as a publicity ploy and inferred that Mayo is not walking the walk. In their defense, this is a young initiative and is not yet fully populated.  I went out and perused the site, and right now, there's not a lot of content on it... yet. How successful it ends up being will of course rely on the engagement and participation of not only the 8 Mayo Clinic staff who are driving it, but their physician and healthcare staff and patients as well.

KevinMD used the announcement as an opportunity to discuss the trend of medical students using tools like Facebook and Twitter, and how to address this on their med school applications, as pointed out by Dr. Vartabedian's Blog, 33 Charts "Does Twitter Belong On Your Medical School Application?" where he gives advice on how to parlay social media experience into a positive. Just the fact that he addressed this quesiton shows how younger docs or docs-to-be value their social media experience, and how other generations may overlook it as something that brings value or experience to the applicant.

The fact that Mayo is pouring resources into their own Center or Social Media, even though it's still in its infancy, provides validation to those who have been espousing the potential power of social media in medicine and healthcare.  It'll be interesting to see how this develops and whether other organizations follow suit.

About the Author

Stephen Welch

Senior Vice President, Communications
Executive Editor, CHEST

This blog, "It Ain't Rocket Surgery" is intended to help busy health-care professionals find useful online and mobile resources that will enhance their self-education and professional research efforts, or point out important topics of discussion related to online information and content. The blog's title is a Yogi Berra style mash-up of two common phrases, "it ain't brain surgery" and "it ain't rocket science". I hope it will be casual, fun, insightful, and -- most of all -- educational.

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I currently serve ACCP as the Senior Vice President of Communications, as well as the Executive Editor of CHEST, the ACCP’s flagship journal. During my 15 years here, ACCP has focused on growing and developing the editorial, technological, and business aspects of the College. We are constantly striving to make the journal and other ACCP educational content as accessible and useful to clinicians as possible.

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