Social Media Summit at Mayo Clinic: Final Day Exclusive Report

EXCLUSIVE POST – Lee Aase and his team planned a week’s worth of events, including a meeting of Mayo Clinic Social Media Network members and a social media “residency,” at the social media summit ended Wednesday.  It ended on a high note, with a stirring keynote by Dave deBronkart, aka @ePatientDave.  He told his story of calamitous cancer diagnosis with a death sentence, to online patient community (starting with a listserv, folks – primitive, you might say, but chock full of actionable information), to clinicians with a patien

EXCLUSIVE POST – Lee Aase and his team planned a week’s worth of events, including a meeting of Mayo Clinic Social Media Network members and a social media “residency,” at the social media summit ended Wednesday.  It ended on a high note, with a stirring keynote by Dave deBronkart, aka @ePatientDave.  He told his story of calamitous cancer diagnosis with a death sentence, to online patient community (starting with a listserv, folks – primitive, you might say, but chock full of actionable information), to clinicians with a patient-centered, participatory way about them, to leading the Society of Participatory Medicine with his doc, Danny Sands, reinvigorating the e-patients.net group blog (you can find my byline there, too, from time to time), to dancing at his daughter’s wedding long after he had expected to die, to being an international spokesperson (and prod to action) for e-patients and the engaged, participatory, patient-centered, shared decisionmaking ethos that patients – and physicians – must subscribe to in order to advance excellence in patient care.

My gloss on the imperative to pursue these lofty goals is born of a stark economic reality: in the future (the very near future), health care providers will have to do more with less.  (Consider, for example, impending deep Medicare cuts.)  In order to do so successfully, they will need to work collaboratively with patients – and with each other — in ways that many have not (in large part) to date, because economic incentives to do so have not necessarily been there.  Social media will be a part of the solution to this problem.

Before Dave’s closing keynote I was transfixed by the performance — because that’s what it was — of speechwriter (ex-Microsoft) and children’s book author Justina Chen.  She led us through some examples, and then the planning and structure needed to create examples, of compelling communications.

Bottom line: Tell a story. Make it real, compelling, personal, delve into your organization’s mythology, DNA, tie it to the subject matter at hand, and you can have — for example — the corporate equivalent of a viral video on YouTube: verbatim quotes from a product-launch speech shared by multiple MSM outlets.  One of her key examples was about Microsoft’s launch of x-box kinect, but the lessons are generalizable.  More important than her specific examples were the structured pathways she laid out to elicit and build the stories that will work wonders — whether writing as a speechwriter or ghostwriter, or cooking up your own killer presentation.  

Chen’s outline: Determine the intention of the presentation, research the background of the story you want to tell, research your story, your sources, your spokesperson, collect individual nuggets (e.g., through interviews), storywriting, collaboration with others in building and telling a story, create your text, rehearse delivery (for a speech or presentation), deliver it, share it (so, for example, others within an organization can deliver the same presentation, consistently), and improve it. 

In between these two star turns I believe I ably discharged my duties on the legal and regulatory panel. Please feel free to take a look at the slides from my own killer presentation, “Health Care Social Media: The Lawyers Don’t Always Say No.”  My key point: You can use social media effectively and stay on the right side of the law. How do you do it?  Be cognizant of the restrictions that are put in place by the myriad laws and regulations applicable in this space – HIPAA and state privacy laws, FTC (disclosures for endorsements) , IRS (if dealing with tax-exempt organizations), fraud and abuse, fee-splitting (daily deal sites), to name a few.  Choose channels that are appropriate to meet your organizational goals, and develop policies and procedures appropriate to your organization’s social media readiness level.  For more of my take on health care social media, please see my Jumping In … post here on HealthWorks Collective, and the social media entries on my home blog, HealthBlawg. 

Dan Goldman, internal legal advisor at Mayo (responsible for social media, among other things) spoke about other sorts of uses and potential misuses of social media, and re-emphasized the need to deal with these issues through the development of social media policies, and training staff on their use.  Randy Schwarz added some practical detail on the roll-out of newly-updated Mayo policies and staff training. 

I’m sorry I couldn’t stay all week at Mayo, but I’m glad I was able to connect – in real life – with so many folks I know on line.  It was a great forum for sharing ideas, insights and information. 

  Keep in touch!