As an adjunct professor, pediatric ENT surgeon and CEO and chief medical officer of Annica Media, Russell Faust would seem to have his hands full, a jam-packed schedule and plenty of reasons not to take on the potential time-suck of social media.

And yet, despite all that, he’s not only a firm believer in the value of social media — blogging in particular — he also believes it holds the key to better care, better connections with patients and more efficient operations.

It’s an argument he lays out well in (where else?) a post on his blog: Why Physicians (like me) Blog. In short, his answer is simple: the potential return on investment is extraordinary. Among the benefits he cites:

• You will gain market share – yes, it will help grow your practice!
• You will be recognized as an authority in your area of practice (which will also grow your practice)
• You will be better connected with your patients: compliance with your diagnostic and treatment regimens will improve
• Your patients will arrive in clinic better-educated, and take less time in your clinic: it will streamline your clinic work flow!
• Your patients will be less needy outside of clinic: they will require less time on the phone with you and your nurses
• You will more closely approximate the relationship with your patients that earlier generations of physicians enjoyed
• In short: your participation in social media provides a win/win for your practice and your patients. It is good medicine.

While Faust is clearly an advocate for social media — Annica Media is a medical practice marketing company — he’s not blind to the fact that it can be yet another time-consuming commitment for doctors who are already busy with consults, surgeries and running a small business.

But spending 1-2 hours per week on his own blog, he says that he began receiving 5,000 unique visits to it after 12 months and, three years later, now receives 15,000 to 20,000. More important, perhaps, 30–50% of his new patients arrive at his clinic by way of his digital presence.

When you think of it that way, the question isn’t why a physician like Dr. Faust blogs, but rather, why more physicians don’t.

Doctor Takeaways

1. If content is king, context is queen

Writing a blog is about giving aesthetic consumers information they seek, not about touting your credentials or promoting your practice. Pay attention to trending topics in the news, the questions consumers post on sites like RealSelf and the issues current patients raise and you’ll build an audience that turns to you for both thought leadership and future appointments.

2. Don’t reinvent the wheel, repurpose it

Unless you’re a natural-born writer, creating good content from scratch can be tedious and time-consuming. Fortunately, there’s a wealth of good information out there — statistics, original research, trend data — that you can tap into. Adding insights based on your own experience will personalize your posts and ensure they align with your readers’ needs and concerns.

3. Use social tools to extend your reach

Once you’ve created a post, don’t just let it sit there. Repurpose it again by posting a link to it on your social media profiles, creating a YouTube video based on it or recasting it as a press release for local media. Invite your readers to share your posts, as well, by including sharing buttons for ShareThis, Reddit, RSS, etc.

4. Update your patient intake form

If your patient intake form doesn’t ask potential patients how they found you, it should. You can either ask an open-ended question — Where did you hear about us? — or include a list with check boxes for your major sources of referrals. Either way, you’ll gain invaluable insights as to exactly where best to expend your efforts.

After our presentation at  the 2013 ASAPS Conference in New York, a doctor came up to me with concern about establishing a Code of Conduct (CoC) for her team.  “My world is already surrounded by rules, policies and regulation.  Doesn’t a Code of Conduct just create more rules for my team?   Isn’t social media supposed to be free-flowing?”

That’s a great question!

First and foremost, your Code of Conduct for social media should not be just a bunch of Do’s and Don’ts.  No one likes to be restricted and told what to do.  Instead, people want a framework to support their creativity and guidelines to point them in the right direction.

When done correctly, your Code of Conduct should not only represent your values but also the core values of social media:  Openness, Engagement and Community.  It will give your staff a set of values to rally around and to guide them in their online interactions.  So as you build your CoC, don’t get caught up in creating just another set of rules.  Ask yourself:

1) Does our CoC encourage openness and connection with our practice?  

Social media thrives on being connected with more than just other people.  It also connects your content and followers with other resources, sites, blogs and even traditional media.  Sites like Facebook, Twitter and even RealSelf all invest tremendous resources to remove barriers in their user experience that might prevent content from being connected to as many as people as possible.

2) Does our CoC allow people to engage with us through conversation and participation, directly or indirectly?

Successful social media encourages everyone to contribute and provide feedback.  Even traditional media (like magazines and TV) realize the limitations of their one-way communication format, so they often connect their audience to social media because that’s where the conversation is taking place and they want to leverage the engagement that’s happening online.

3) Does our CoC help build a foundation of trust that allows my practice to engage and learn from the community?  

Since social media spurs communities around groups of people and shared interests, your social media strategy and the principles used to execute it should not only allow you to engage with your online community but also allow you to learn from them and even ask community members for feedback.

Your Code of Conduct is an explicit message to your staff on what you value.  Align those values with social media and set clear guidelines with your team to ensure your Code of Conduct goes beyond a simple set of rules.

I’ll share some best practices for a Code of Conduct in a subsequent post.

In my world, I am in direct communication with doctors every day.  I often get to hear the wonderful feedback from doctors on how their Q&A contributions and positive online reviews are helping them attract new patients and grow their practice.  That’s the fun part of my job.

The other side of the coin is not much fun but very important.  At least once every week I find myself helping a doctor or their staff with some type of ‘reputation management’ advice to help mitigate unfavorable content posted online about the doctor.  Sometimes, this unexpected post is a negative patient review.

More often, though, I get frantic calls from a doctor’s office about an inappropriate comment that a staff member has posted or, worse yet, I get a call from the staff about something inappropriate that the doctor has posted.  I’ll spare you the examples, let’s just say ‘awkward’ and ‘oops’ do not begin to describe some of the snafus I’ve seen doctors get themselves into with inappropriate comments!

In reality, the principles for representing your practice in social media include the same principles, ethics and confidentiality policies expected every day in your regular course of business.  It seems like common sense, but it’s not always obvious to everyone.  For this reason, I highly recommend that every doctor take the time to establish a Code of Conduct (CoC) with their staff to set standards on how they want themselves and their practice represented online and how they will respond to unfavorable posts when they inevitably happen.

One of the best examples of what a Code of Conduct can do for your practice was demonstrated by Johnson & Johnson during The Tylenol Crisis in 1982.  After product tampering led to 7 deaths and a product recall, Tylenol could have easily met its demise if the situation was not handled properly.  Instead, the company turned to a credo that was written in the 1940s on how they would handle a crisis and restore confidence in their brand.  Within a year, Tylenol had regained their market share and they continue to be one of the most trusted brands today.

By taking time to establish your practice’s CoC, if there is ever any question with how your team is expected to behave in the world of social media, proactively or reactively, they can refer to it as a guideline and rule of thumb.   As a result, the clarity of expectations will allow your staff to be better equipped to monitor their own actions within your social media strategy as well as make it easier for you to evaluate the effectiveness and appropriateness of their contributions.

Doctor Takeaways

1. It’s not always obvious

The boundaries of social media are more fluid than offline communication and often lead people to feel more comfortable in how far they can push the envelope.  Take the time to discuss with your staff how you can develop your online voice while maintaining privacy and professionalism.

2. Plan ahead

Don’t wait until a staff member posts something inappropriate or you receive negative feedback online to establish how you will or will not respond.  An effective Code of Conduct can serve as your ‘crisis management plan’ to help maintain your online reputation when unexpected posts happen.

3. Consider your brand

A CoC is not just about a crisis management plan.  It’s also a way to define how you want to be represented online.   Is it fun/social?  Strictly professional?  As an expert in a specific treatment?   A CoC can help align your Facebook page, Twitter feed, etc., with your vision.

The fact is that customer service should be a crucial part of your social media strategy for the simple reason that customers increasingly expect companies to provide it. As this infographic from Zendesk shows, 50% of consumers say they would be deterred from being a customer of a company that didn’t answer questions or complaints via social media.

The flip side is that the simple act of responding to customer complaints doesn’t just provide a way to resolve the issue at hand. It can also provide a net positive as many of those customers will not only retract their initial complaint; they’ll take to social media to share their satisfaction with others in their own social networks, becoming brand advocates in the process.

Simply put, people want to be heard and doctors who listen — and respond — stand to benefit from what they have to say.

Doctor Takeaway

The future of customer service is social

Doctors who ignore social customer service issues risk losing not just the patient who raised the issue but everyone that that patient shares their experience with. The solution is to respond quickly to prevent the problem from spreading, genuinely to avoid the lip-service trap and professionally to avoid violating patient privacy. If you do all that and the issue remains unresolved, that’s a good sign that it’s time to take the conversation offline.

]]> http://www.medibeauty.biz/infographic-friday-get-social-to-counter-patient-complaints/feed/ 0 http://www.medibeauty.biz/private-practice-public-life-six-tips-to-make-sure-you-are-celebrity-ready/ http://www.medibeauty.biz/private-practice-public-life-six-tips-to-make-sure-you-are-celebrity-ready/#comments Mon, 15 Apr 2013 16:00:37 +0000 Rob Lovitt http://www.medibeauty.biz/?p=1283

For cosmetic surgeons, “celebrity status” carries both rewards and a responsibility to maintain professional standards (photo by Kyle Monahan via flickr).

By Maureen Francisco

Once upon a time, aesthetic professionals who worked on celebrities could enjoy seeing their handiwork in the public eye while remaining comfortably out of the spotlight. Not anymore. Between social media and reality TV, what was once a highly private matter is now increasingly high-profile and considered ready for primetime.

This presents both hazards and potential benefits for cosmetic surgeons because that “increased exposure” can have both business and legal ramifications.

Consider the buzz around the reality show Plastic Wives on TLC, which has brought the discipline into living rooms across the country. As the title of the show suggests, it’s the spouses of the surgeons who get top billing but they’re not the only ones who may see a boost in their “ratings.”

Not yet do I feel like a celeb but I would, no doubt, be very gracious if the show does bring more exposure and prosperity to my business, says Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Ryan Stanton, who has received a shot of instant fame by being on the show. Either way, being professional and ethical as well as a gentleman remains at the top of my list as a board certified plastic surgeon.

But these days, doctors’ personal lives can end up under the microscope even if they’re not on TV, thanks to the Internet and the rise of social media. “[Being a doctor] does not stop when we turn out the lights at night,” says Dr. Christopher Khorsandi, who operates a practice in Las Vegas.

Unlike Hollywood, there’s no paparazzi following Khorsandi, but he’s followed in other ways thanks to the popularity of social media sites like Twitter, YouTube and so on.

That can be a good thing, says Dr. Khorsandi, because it means he has a wider reach and is able to attract patients from all over the world. More exposure means more opportunities.

But Internet recognition — a form of celebrity status in its own right — also means that doctors could run into a future patient unknowingly. That could be a “friend” on Facebook, via a “like” on RealSelf or by sharing photos or comments in an inappropriate manner.

Being a doctor is not a job, it’s a vocation, says Khorsandi. Thus, it is imperative that we keep our white coats neatly pressed at all times.

So how can doctors ensure that their “celebrity status” doesn’t land them in the tabloids or, worse yet, court?

1. Make sure there’s no questionable verbiage on any social media sites.
2. Do a second take on pictures. For example, if you are holding a glass of water, would other people interpret that as alcohol?
3. Manage your reputation online. A site like RealSelf allows you to give answers in your authentic voice where potential patients can read them.
4. Understand what you do in your personal life may lead people to judge your professional life too.
5. Grasp that the Internet is forever. If you think something might be even remotely inappropriate, don’t post it, don’t upload it, don’t do it. When in doubt, go another route.
6. Be nice. When people don’t like something, they tell everybody. When people like something, they tell everybody. Don’t yell at people. Don’t use profanity with customer relations. You get the idea.

Maureen Francisco is a Sr. Doctor Community Advisor on RealSelf, a journalist and author of  It Takes Moxie: Off the Boat, Or Out of School, To Making it Your Way in America, which outlines how to achieve the American dream, using stories of successful immigrants and those who came from humble beginnings. Maureen has contributed online for major publications like Forbes and Huffington Post. 

Doctors who create a formal Code of Conduct for social media interaction protect patients — and their practices. (Photo by bobbi vie via flickr.)

No doubt, you’ve heard the horror stories: In Missouri, an OB-GYN is reprimanded for posting inappropriate comments about a patient on Facebook. In Rhode Island, a doctor is fired and fined after revealing identifiable patient information on the site. And in St. Louis, a cosmetic surgeon is sued for negligence after the digital information in her Before & After gallery is used to determine the identity of her otherwise-anonymous patients.

Does that mean you should avoid social media altogether? Absolutely not. For one thing, eschewing the medium also means not connecting with the millions of people who rely on it as a primary source of healthcare information. For another, it’s not the medium that created the problem for the above doctors; it’s how they used it.

The key is not to avoid social media but to create a code of conduct that allows you and your staff to interact with aesthetic consumers while maintaining professional standards and patient privacy.

The fact is that social media is both a cause and effect in the trend toward “participatory medicine,” in which patients play an increasingly active role in making decisions about their healthcare. The difference is that the conversations that lead to those decisions are no longer confined by the walls of your practice. Between Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites, what’s posted online by and about you can go viral in minutes and has the potential to stay on the Internet forever.

And since ignoring those conversations isn’t an option — they’re ongoing whether you participate or not — you need to make sure a) you’re listening, b) joining in to make sure your voice is heard and c) responding in a manner that supports your practice philosophy and protects your professional reputation. As Maureen Ezekwugo, EVP Doctor Community at RealSelf, says,

Establishing a Code of Conduct for social media will provide guideposts to set the direction of your online brand and keep your social media strategy on track.

Create it, codify it and coordinate its implementation with your staff and you’ll never have to worry about seeing your name added to the list of social healthcare’s cautionary tales.

Doctor Takeaways

1. Protecting patients also provides safeguards for doctors

Rule No. 1 in any Code of Conduct is the same regardless of the medium of expression: Maintain patient confidentiality. Ensure anything that’s shared via social media can’t be used to identify individual patients; scrub photos of patients’ names and file data, and maintain appropriate boundaries of the patient-physician relationship just as you would in any other context.

2. Establishing who can post on your behalf ensures consistency

Some doctors enjoy engaging in social media; others find they just don’t have the time. It’s okay to have other members of your practice participate in social conversations but since they’re speaking for you, it’s crucial that you establish ground rules as to who can respond, what they can and can’t say, and how best to ensure that they respond in ways that support your practice philosophy and provide a sense of authenticity.

3. Meeting — and then exceeding — response times promotes positive impressions

Thanks to the always-on nature of the Internet, people expect to get the information they want quicker than ever and many aesthetic consumers will eliminate doctors who don’t respond to social inquiries from further consideration. To avoid that situation, create a system in which someone from the practice responds within a set amount of time — and then strive to beat the clock. Chances are that patient is making inquiries elsewhere, as well, so speed is of the essence.

4. Responding to negative feedback before it spreads is the key to reputation management

Contrary to popular misconception, most people do not take to the Internet to complain. That said, at some point, you will almost certainly encounter a patient who does. Not responding is not an option — silence in social media only allows bad news to spread farther faster — and reacting in the heat of the moment heightens the risk that you’ll respond emotionally. Establish how your practice will handle negative feedback BEFORE you have to so you can respond rather than react.

If you ever needed proof that marketing your practice via the major social networks isn’t worth the time you spend (or the agency fees you pay), this infographic from JumpThru puts the issue in sharp focus. The fact is that even though women dominate Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, they don’t necessarily trust the sites when they’re seeking advice, researching products and services or making purchasing decisions.

Considering that women also account for roughly 90% of all aesthetic procedures that means you can turn off a lot of potential patients by pushing the wrong message at the wrong time in the wrong place.

 So, where should you market your practice? As the folks at JumpThru note, blogs engender more trust and drive more action than any of the three big social networks. It may be a blog on your practice website, contributions you make to other blogs or even answers you provide to questions in online communities.

In fact, many forward-thinking marketers are recognizing that specialized online communities offer a better ROI than Facebook, etc., because the users in them are, by definition, deeply interested in the issue at hand. They’re not looking for fun or entertainment; they’re looking for information they can use to be confident that they’re making the decisions that are right for them.

“Know your audience and where they like to get information,” says social media strategist Peter Shankman. Once you do that, you can save the time and effort you’ve wasted on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest and put it to better use finding the outlet that delivers your message to your target audience.

With well-thought-out responses and respect for patient privacy, doctors can answer questions online without fear. (Photo by Life Mental Health via flickr)

With hundreds of thousands of doctor answers, RealSelf has a fair sense of how doctors view participating in online Q&A with patients. Most plastic surgeons, dermatologists, cosmetic dentists and related specialties see it as a legitimate extension of their online marketing efforts, or simply, a way to help consumers make better informed decisions about cosmetic procedures.

That said, there are doctors who are uncertain how to quantify or qualify the legal risks they’re taking when posting answers.

As a lawyer, professor and board-certified plastic surgeon, Neal Reisman is well-versed in the legal ramifications of rendering medical advice to aesthetic consumers. So, when he shares a hypothetical scenario regarding answering questions online, it’s worth a listen:

Online consumer: I have a lesion in front of my ear and I’m interested in a facelift. Do you think I can come in for my facelift and get the lesion removed at the same time?

Doctor: Probably, little irregularities can usually be taken out during a facelift.

Online consumer: Great, I’ll see you in three months for my facelift…

The result? She delays treatment of what turns out to be melanoma, which, based on the doctor’s advice, can be considered grounds for negligence, says Reisman: “The doctor never saw her but gave her information that she relied on to her detriment. It sounds crazy but it’s real.”

Indeed there are risks in dispensing medical advice of this nature in a Q&A, or even an e-mail exchange.

Online is where the patients are

There’s no denying the fact that the Internet in general and social media in particular have changed the way doctors and potential patients interact. Five years ago RealSelf didn’t exist. Today over 3.5M unique visitors spend time researching their cosmetic options, and often, reading doctor’s answers to questions posed by others.

This medium for consumer education is evolving so quickly, that many doctors remain unsure of how to proceed. This hesitation effectually erects a barrier between the doctor and aesthetic consumers.

“There are a lot of people, particularly younger people, who have gravitated to where they’re using social media as their primary form of communication,” says Josh King, general counsel at Avvo.com. “They don’t use the phone anymore; they sure as hell don’t use faxes and they many not even see email.”

For such consumers, receiving answers to questions posted online may represent the only way to make contact, says King, and doctors shouldn’t be afraid to do so.

Josh King, general counsel, Avvo.com

“Answering questions online is really no different than the type of generalized guidance that doctors provide people all the time,” he says. “People are looking for that orientation level of information; they’re not looking for a full-blown diagnosis or course of treatment.”

Furthermore, says King, the nature of most online forums, in which consumers ask questions anonymously, precludes concerns over HIPAA: “HIPAA doesn’t apply in online forums because it’s all about the protection of PHI. If it’s all anonymous, then HIPAA is pushed completely out of the way because there’s no PHI in an anonymous forum.

“The big question is whether answering questions online constitutes the practice of medicine,” says King. “In my view, it doesn’t.”

Provide multiple options, not medical advice

Not surprisingly, perhaps, Reisman takes a more conservative approach. “[Social media] is not going away and you need to recognize and understand the liabilities and exposures from what you communicate online,” he says. “Rendering any advice on which a prospective patient can rely establishes a doctor/patient relationship.”

The key word is “rely” as in the hypothetical anecdote above, in which the doctor’s advice prompted the prospective patient to take a particular course of action. “If you give specific advice to someone you don’t know or have never seen,” says Reisman, “you can be violating state law and you can be sued for negligence.”

One way to avoid problems, he says, is to develop general answers with multiple options: “As long as you’re giving a plethora of options, you’re not giving specific information that they can rely on.”

Dr. Neal Reisman

And, he says, prepare a variety of answers in advance, have them ready and your staff on the same page if they provide answers to online queries. After all, he adds, “You oughta know what the questions are going to be by now.”

Once you have a set of prepared answers, you can further protect yourself by paying attention to how you answer the questions you get.

“Answers should be given as opinions and not as advice,” says Maureen Ezekwugo, EVP, Doctor Community, at RealSelf. “Statements such as ‘In my opinion’ or ‘In my past experience’ or ‘In similar situations that I’ve handled…’ can help delineate opinions from advice.” By following this approach, Ezekwugo also points to de minimus risk from participating in online Q&A, “In four years we’ve not heard of a single instance where a doctor’s answer led to a consumer taking legal actions against them.”

For doctors who remain concerned, they can add standard disclaimers to postings. Phrases such as “Without doing an in-office consultation, I can’t say for certain but in situations similar to this, here’s what I’ve found…” underscore your interest in being helpful while clearly stating the content is not to be relied upon for medical decisions.

Engage with patients but avoid the pitfalls

While Reisman, King and Ezekwugo all offer their own takes on answering questions online, they all agree that anything that discloses PHI is to be avoided. And while any doctor worth his or her degree(s) already knows that, things can get tricky when it’s the question, not the answer, that leads to the disclosure.

“Answering questions where someone wrote something where they included personally identifying information can result in elevated risk,” says King. “Likewise, if a patient gets into really specific questions or if it sounds like they might be relying on the answers a little too much, I’d be careful.”

Careful, says King, not so cautious that you miss out on what is probably the most significant development in doctor-patient communication since the fax machine.

“Doctors see the penalties are so onerous that they err on the side of caution in how they communicate with patients,” says King. “That’s rooted in a laudable desire to protect patient privacy but if it serves to keep doctors from communicating with patients through the means that patients are most comfortable with, that’s a bad thing.”

Photo by Alan Cleaver via flickr

After a full day of consults, surgeries and staff meetings, you could be forgiven for thinking that adding more to your workload by maintaining a presence in social media is a time suck you just can’t afford.

Truth is, though, that approach has it exactly backwards because social media can actually save you time in several ways. Here are four of them:

Understand patients’ interests and issues

Aesthetic consumers are nothing if not vocal about the procedures they’re considering — RealSelf alone sees 3 million unique visits a month — and doctors who listen in gain invaluable insights into the issues that dominate the conversation. From their fears to their hopes, the ongoing conversations are like free focus groups that can help make consults more effective.

Answer a question for one, answer it for many

Let’s face it, answering individual emails and returning personal phone calls will always be part of a successful doctor’s day but chances are you’ve answered the same question more times than you count. Answer questions online and you’re not talking to one prospective patient, you’re talking to thousands. That’s not only an exponentially efficient time-saver; it also introduces you to an audience of people who may never have thought to ask you in the first place.

See what the competition is up to

Doctors who avoid social media don’t just miss out on the potential patients who gravitate to the medium; they also forgo valuable intel on how socially savvy doctors are connecting with them. Check out which social networks your competitors are using, how they use them and what sort of engagement they generate and you’ll get a better idea of where to devote your own energies.

Put out fires before they spread

As we’ve noted before, online reviews are here to stay and people are talking about you whether you’re in on the conversation or not. Bad reviews are the exception, not the rule, but in the echo chamber of social media even one bad review can be hazardous to your business health if ignored. If you have to do damage control, it’s a lot easier and far more time-efficient to do it immediately than to wait until it’s a full-scale conflagration.

Then again, you could choose to avoid social media altogether and spend your time wondering what patients want, wading through pages of emailed questions, watching your competitors grow their practices and wishing social media would just go away.

Now, that’s a waste of time.

Claimed your Google+ profile yet? If not, you should. Although the search giant’s social network doesn’t generate the media buzz that its competitors often do, it’s growing fast. In fact, according to a recent report from Global Web Index, Google+ has now surpassed Twitter to become the second-largest social network in the world.

It also provides something other social networks can’t: The increased visibility — and attendant credibility — that comes with Author Rank, Google’s system for assigning value to content based on who produced it. In a nutshell, if Google can ascertain who you are, it’s more likely to assign credibility to what you say, which, in turn, will likely boost your standings in its search rankings.

As The Wall Street Journal recently excerpted from Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s soon-to-be-published book,

Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.

Those “verified online profiles” are what Author Rank is all about. As interpreted by Google’s algorithms, verification is an indicator of expertise and you can see it in action when you do a search and notice that some results feature thumbnail pictures and bylines of the people associated with the links.

If you want those results to include your photo and your byline instead of your competitors’, Google+ is the way to go.

Doctor Takeaway

With Google+, the sum is greater than the parts

Don’t buy into the antiquated idea that Google+ is a “ghost town” compared to Facebook or Twitter. The latter two may have more activity on a day-to-day basis but Google provides the one-two punch of search dominance and authorship credibility. If you have a blog — or produce any sort of similar online content — claim your Google+ profile, link it to your website and keep the content coming.