Social Media as an enhancer of patient experience

Today, I was going through one of the articles in Internet in recognizing the role of social media in hospitals and how it can enhance patient experience.  Different examples were cited from some of the prestigious Canadian healthcare organizations on how they have effectively utilized social media.

As an avid researcher in patient experience, I totally agree to the fact that social media needs to be incorporated into healthcare and its potential is still undervalued.  We need to think about how we can incorporate social media in enhancing patient experience.  Cited are few examples from my thought and your valuable input will be highly appreciated.

1.       Each individual hospital should form active groups (to include clinicians, patients, and their families) for their specialty services like Ob/Gyn, services dealing with long-term illnesses, genetic diseases, nutrition/dietetics, etc where they participate and discuss various aspects of care where clinician-patient interaction reaches the next level.  If we can incorporate community services to it, fantastic !

2.       Media like Twitter can be utilized for patient notification services.

3.       Social campaigns for preventive medicine can also be effectively carried out through social media. 

Social media like Facebook, Twitter, etc are used by some of the healthcare organizations in UAE as we see small logos under their website, but the question arises if they are using to its full potential? If not why?  One the reasons maybe it’s a new way of thinking.  Patients and clinicians needs to be educated to actively involve and thus changing the way of healthcare delivery.