In August, we posted openings for new staff positions with the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media. We’re pleased at the progress we’ve made in hiring good people for several of the positions, including manager Ron Petrovich, and in future posts I will introduce you to the new members of the team.

One of the positions was delayed in posting, however, and is just now open for applications. It’s based on our Phoenix/Scottsdale, Ariz. campus. The primary focus will be on-site strategic consultation and training in social media for Mayo staff and business units. The role will be both internal and external; helping our staff use the tools and platforms the center is developing to accomplish Mayo’s business objectives, but also developing resources to be shared through the Social Media Health Network. Video experience and/or fluency in Spanish are a plus.

To learn more or to apply for the Arizona position, see posting #8379.

We’re pleased to introduce our newest staff member, Ron Petrovich, who began work yesterday as a manager in the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media.

Ron’s background is in television; after serving as news director for local TV stations in Milwaukee and Indianopolis, he most recently worked at Medstar, a producer of television and new media medical and health information.

You can connect with Ron on Twitter at (@RonaldPetrovich).

Over the last several weeks we have been focusing on staffing and other development issues for the Center. As we start to get staff on board, we’ll be working through the process of selecting the remaining members for the External Advisory Board (which is a big job because we had 120 highly qualified applicants for the remaining 12 spots) and making plans for our first events through the Social Media Health Network.

Watch for further announcements in the coming days and weeks.

The Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media will host hosted a special Twitter training camp – or Tweetcamp – on Thursday, Sept. 30 from 9:30 to 11 a.m. on the Mayo Clinic campus in Jacksonville, Fla.

Lee Aase, director of Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, will lead led the training session along with Kathy Barbour, a communications manager for Mayo Clinic in Florida.

The slides for the session are embedded below:

Participants worldwide joined via conference call to listen to the presentation, and also through the #tweetcamp hashtag discussion.

Providing social media training to people interested in using social media tools to improve health care, promote health and fight disease is part of the mission for the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media. The center provides training opportunities to Mayo Clinic employees but also offers them to others through the Social Media Health Network.

For more information on joining the network, contact the Center for Social Media by email.

Yesterday we announced formation of the Social Media Health Network, a global network of organizations and individuals interested in using social media to improve health care, promote health and fight disease.

Today we’re announcing a one-year collaboration agreement with Ragan Communications to produce a series of events that will be among the benefits for members of the network. See details in the slideshow below:

Sign up for more information on joining the Social Media Health Network. More information on #tweetcamp will be coming in a post here later today.

The mission for our Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media is to

Lead the social media revolution in health care, improving health and well-being for people everywhere.

We’re pleased to announce today the formation of our external advisory board, a 25-member group of fellow revolutionaries, to help us fulfill that mission. Members will provide advice and feedback to our center leadership on various programs and initiatives, and will be a source of ideas for worthwhile projects. They also will contribute content for this site and their perspectives on health-related developments in social media.

Our goal is to have a well-rounded board with diverse backgrounds, capabilities and interests that encourages a wide range of applications for social media tools to improve health and the health care system, and to bring perspectives from other industries and government to the conversations. These are volunteer positions, although members will receive free admission to events sponsored by the center.

The first 13 members selected for one-year terms are listed on the Advisory Board page. These are among the pioneers in applying social media in health care and humanitarian endeavors. We’re honored that they are willing to serve.

We want your help in nominating and selecting candidates for the remaining 12 positions to give us the well-rounded board we’re seeking, reflecting diversity in all its forms.

We’d like to have representatives from state, local or federal government, public health, medical and scientific journals, hospital and nursing associations, disease-oriented organizations and patient foundations, medical associations and specialty societies, and of course physicians. While we have a pair of patients among our initial members, we’re open to more. And we don’t want to limit nominations to the foregoing categories: we hope to also have representatives from other industries (such as the technology sector) that are more advanced in application of social media than health care has been.

Together with an internal advisory team we’ll be recruiting from throughout the Mayo system, the external advisory board will be an energetic force to help accelerate thoughtful adoption of social media to promote health and improve health care.

Here are three ways you can help:

1. If you are interested in serving, please submit your application according to the process outlined below.
2. Please spread the word to help us gather a strong field of candidates. (Maybe use the sharing buttons below, or post to your Facebook profile. Or you could even use old-fashioned email.)
3. Encourage people you know who would be good board members to apply.

Application process:

1. To become a candidate for the board, send an email by clicking this link. In addition to your contact information and a bit of biography, make the case for your candidacy. Describe in 200 words or less why you are interested, the perspective you would represent and the contribution you would make as a member of the board. The application deadline is October 15, 2010.
2. Creative means of application also are welcome and encouraged. For instance, you could write a post on your blog giving the rationale for your candidacy, or upload a video to YouTube making your multimedia case. Just be sure to either send us the link via email or tweet it using the #MCCSM hashtag.

Update: The application deadline for advisory board members has passed. We are now reviewing the applications to select the additional members.

Fear is a major barrier to adoption of social media. That’s especially true within health care. Among the common objections to openness:

• “What if someone criticizes us on our blog?”
• “What if an employee posts inappropriate material on Facebook?”
• “What if our employees spend all their time on Facebook and YouTube, instead of doing their work?”

These fears are not irrational. But as we have seen in Dan Goldman’s posts here, here, here and here, they can be relieved with reasonable policies and appropriate training.

To overcome your anxieties and move to productive engagement in social media, you need to…

Face your fears

This post begins a weekly series in which I will examine examples of social media faux pas, literally “false steps.” I had thought about calling the series “Friday Follies” but while these may be examples of extreme foolishness, I didn’t like the connotation of humor inherent in that title. There’s nothing funny about these examples.

Here’s the first Friday Faux Pas, courtesy of the Newark, New Jersey Star-Ledger:

Last month, Stony Brook University Medical Center in Long Island announced it was developing a revised ethics policy after a student posted a photo on Facebook of a classmate posing with a thumbs up next to a cadaver. The State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse also is updating its ethics curriculum after a former resident posted a snapshot of an exposed brain on Facebook.

Students’ use of social media sites is becoming an increasing concern, according to an anonymous survey of 78 U.S. medical schools published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Nearly 60 percent of schools reported catching students posting unprofessional online content, including several blatant violations of patient confidentiality.

“It’s Facebook, Twitter, blogging, MySpace,” said Lauren Hughes, president of the American Medical Student Association, a Virginia-based advocacy group. “Right now, institutions are dealing with this on an individual basis.”

Discussion/Analysis:

The real problem in this case didn’t begin with Facebook. The real problem is that medical students were taking inappropriate pictures and behaving unprofessionally. Posting the picture to Facebook only brought the misconduct to light. Social media platforms increase the cost of bad behavior.

The good news in this case is that it is prompting review of ethics guidelines in medical schools. The Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media also plans to collaborate with other organizations to develop model guidelines and policies, along with educational and training materials for employees and students. We will be sharing those with the community to help prevent problematic uses of social media in health care.

Accepting Nominations:

If you are aware of an example that fits the Friday Faux Pas theme, please send your nomination, including relevant links to the on-line stories. Include your analysis of the issue, too. It may be featured in a future post.

Parting Questions:

1. With half a billion active monthly users of Facebook worldwide, what do you think are the odds that none of them will be your employees, students, patients or customers?
2. Is it likely that none of them will have iPhones, Androids or other smart phones?
3. Given what I expect are your answers to the first two questions, aren’t you already at risk of a Friday Faux Pas, whether your organization is officially engaged in social media or not?

In Part 1 of The Importance of Being Nimble, I highlighted use of a consumer-grade video camera to quickly capture an interview with a Mayo Clinic researcher, and how that enabled us to get news coverage for a study published in Journal of the American Medical Association.

This simplified, nimble approach to gathering video has been even more helpful in gathering patient stories. Here’s a sample of some highlights from the last couple of years:

The common thread in most of these video segments is that they were shot on extremely short notice on our Mayo Clinic campus, or while I was traveling.

• I got the call about Rhonda King, who was here from the San Francisco area with her husband and son, at about 3 p.m. on a Friday afternoon.  They were going home the next day. An hour later I was able to interview Rhonda telling the story of getting a second opinion for her son, Trevor, at her hotel near our campus. There was no way we could have pulled together a video crew on such short notice.
• Al Errato and his wife Mary are from Connecticut, and while we technically could have gotten a video crew to capture their story, we were able to act much more quickly by using a pocket camera on a tripod.
• I heard from Sheila Robb through her husband, Ted. She was eager to tell the story of how a series of Mayo advances had helped her fight breast cancer long enough so she could survive to take advantage of the next advance. She finally lost her 10-year battle earlier this year, but was grateful for the difference Mayo had made for her.
• Anne and Tony de Bari are from Michigan. He’s an orthopedic surgeon, and she had just been diagnosed with metastatic liver cancer. I interviewed them the same morning I met Ted and Sheila Robb.
• I got to interview Jayson Werth, an outfielder for the Phillies, when I was in Philadelphia, again using my pocket camera and tripod. He has a tremendous story of recovering from a mysterious career-threatening wrist injury after diagnosis and surgery at Mayo Clinic, and capturing him telling the story in his own words was extremely important in getting it told in USA Today. If I had to line up a freelance crew in Philadelphia, we would not have been able to make it happen.
• I interviewed Marlow and Frances Cowan, our famous Octogenarian Idols from Ankeny, Iowa, on my way through their state as I was headed to a meeting. Their piano duet at Mayo Clinic has been seen more than 7.2 million times on YouTube; this video shot on my pocket camcorder the week before their appearance on Good Morning America has more than 200,000 views. (And by the way, the video that started it all was also captured with a nimble device, Sharon Turner’s phone.)
• I received a call about Rachel Nielson, from Colorado Springs, on a Wednesday afternoon this past February. She was at Mayo Clinic in Rochester for the first time, and was amazed by her experience. Later that afternoon she was telling me, on video, how the integrated team approach had made such a difference for her.
• Corrie Mork, from southern Iowa, had contacted me via email about the experience of her son Andrew at Mayo Clinic. Andrew had been diagnosed with a brain tumor during his Air Force basic training, and he and his mother shared their story through this post she had written, but which was greatly enhanced through video.

Please click through the links above to see the full stories. Each one of them is touching, and none of them would have been told  (at least as compellingly) without the aid of consumer-grade video cameras, which enabled us to be nimble.

And if you think it takes a massive budget for all this, consider that the cameras used for these videos cost $200 or less.

In a post earlier this week on e-patients.net, Victor Montori, M.D., interim medical director for the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, described his reasons for joining the Society for Participatory Medicine. Here’s an excerpt:

The civil rights movement has not finished its job. In the list of people who are routinely oppressed today we find patients. I have come to understand that physicians, and I am one, oppress patients not willingly, not deliberately, not intentionally. Oppression of patients is also the result of actions by healthcare administrators, payers, pharma, device manufacturers, and governments, perhaps often unwillingly. At its simplest, oppression (and coercion, and injustice) results from patients staying in the dark about their own health state, their available options and the relative merits of each, the extent to which services can flexibly meet their needs, and the extent to which uncertainty, ignorance, and impotence remain part and parcel of modern medicine.

I invite you to read the rest of his post, which helps also provide the context for formation of the Center for Social Media.

It’s all about the Patient!

By helping to accelerate adoption of social media within healthcare, the center aims to empower patients to get access to the information they need so they can advocate for themselves.

Many medical observers, including our former Mayo Clinic CEO, have lamented the slow pace of change in the health care system, and that on average it takes 17 years for research findings to become incorporated broadly in day-to-day patient care.

Through the center we want to help information about new research findings to spread more quickly and be more accessible to health care professionals, and to make it easier for them to connect and collaborate. Using these social media “power tools” for communication will improve the efficiency and effectiveness of health care organizations, and also will enable productive research and education connections throughout the health care system.

But we also want to increase direct access to the information for informed and empowered patients. By increasing participation in social media by physicians, scientists and other medical professionals, we will help the “oppressed” patients Dr. Montori describes.

In launching the center, Dr. Montori described the thinking of Mayo Clinic’s physician leaders:

Through the center, we will be increasing the amount of in-depth information about diseases and conditions Mayo Clinic makes available to patients via social platforms, and we’re inviting other medical professionals — whether individually or through their organizations — to join us in this commitment.

In the coming weeks we will be announcing formation of a global network dedicated to productive application of social tools to improve health and health care. If you would like more information about becoming part of the network, contact us by email.

Editor’s Note: This is part of a series by Mayo Clinic attorney Dan Goldman on legal and employee policy issues in social media for healthcare organizations.

What’s Unique About Healthcare Social Media?

Privacy. HIPAA and state privacy laws make social media particularly challenging in healthcare. As well, these strict privacy requirements mean that the stakes are high if your employees act in appropriately in their use of social media. Violations of patient privacy, whether international or inadvertent, can lead to liability under HIPAA and state privacy laws, and to enormous PR ramifications for your facility. Another issue to think through is that privacy laws limit your ability to engage in the social media dialogue, and may prevent you from defending your company online.

If you are a car manufacturer and someone posts on their Facebook page that that your car was defective and caused an accident you can respond on their facebook page (or your own). However, if you’re a healthcare provider and someone posts on your facebook page that your hospital committed malpractice when you treated them, you generally would be prevented by HIPAA and state privacy laws from defending yourself since it would invariably require you to disclose the patient’s protected health information (PHI).

Practice of medicine issues. While this issue is not unique to social media (it’s an issue whenever providers interact with patients and potential patients on the Internet), the nature of social media (personal interaction, dialogue, etc.) means there is an increased risk that providers will unintentionally be seen as practicing medicine or otherwise providing care to patients or prospective patients, which can lead to malpractice claims, and could raise licensure issues if the “patient” is located in a state in which the provider is not licensed. Twitter raises the additional risk that due to its short character limit it’s more difficult to provide any meaningful disclaimers regarding this issue.

Ethical issues of medical professionals becoming social media “friends” with their patients. An outgrowth of the blurring of professional and private personas. Is it ever appropriate for a healthcare provider to become social media “friends” with a patient on their non-work related social media profiles? This question can raise challenging issues regarding appropriate boundaries for the treating relationship, especially for mental health professionals.

In the third installment in this series, Dan will offer guidelines for developing organizational social media policies for employees.

Below are links to several news articles and blog posts about Tuesday’s announcement of the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media:

• Minneapolis Star Tribune: Mayo Clinic to open social media center – 7/27/2010
• KAAL-TV: Mayo Turning to More Social Media – 7/27/2010
• Rochester Post-Bulletin: Mayo Clinic create Center for Social Media – 7/27/10
• 33 Charts: Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media: What it Represents – 7/27/2010
• MedCity News: Mayo Clinic looks to train other hospitals in social-media use – 7/27/2010
• KTTC-TV: Mayo Clinic creates Center for Social Media – 7/27/2010
• I Crashed The Web: Mayo Clinic launches a Center for Social Media – 7/27/2010
• Wall Street Journal: Health Blog Q & A – Mayo Clinic’s New Center for Social Media – 7/28/2010
• Kaiser Health News: Mayo Leaps Into Social Media Marketing – 7/28/2010
• Conversation Agent: Leading an Industry: Mayo Clinic Rolls out Center for Social Media – 7/28/2010
• Fierce Healthcare: Mayo Clinic aims to accelerate online presence with new social media center – 7/28/2010
• CNN Health: The Chart – Mayo Clinic starts social media center – 7/29/2010
• iHealthBeat: Mayo Clinic Launches Center To Help Groups Adopt Social Media – 7/29/2010
• Twin Cities Public Television: Almanac – 7/30/2010
• PSFK – Mayo Clinic Announces Healthcare’s First Center for Social Media – 7/30/2010
• Scienceroll – Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media – 8/2/2010
• AHDI Lounge – Mayo Clinic Embraces Social Media in a Big Way – 8/2/2010
• NewStatesman – Mayo Clinic launches social media centre to connect doctors and patients – 8/2/2010
• For Immediate Release – Lee Aase on Mayo Clinic’s Center for Social Media – 8/5/2010
• American Medical News – Mayo social media project reflects deeper interest by doctors – 8/9/2010
• Shari Weiss – When Mayo Clinic Openly Values Social Media, Can Rest of World Be Far Behind? – 8/8/2010