Mayo Clinic’s New Center for Social Media…Society is Integrating with Social Media.

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I can imagine that we will be seeing more and more of this.   Society is increasing its rate of social media integration.  Before we were just integrating websites, now we need to focus on integrating entire segments of society.  How far will this go?  Is there a point where it will go too far?  All I can say is that I will be on the Social Media River  till the bitter or the happy end…doesn’t matter to me.

Here’s the article: By Katherine Hobson

Mayo Clinic has been taking advantage of social media — including Facebook, Twitter and patient and employee blogs — for several years.

Today Mayo announced the launch of a Center for Social Media, which it says will expand social media tools beyond the traditional P.R. and marketing functions to use by staff, physicians and patients. We chatted by phone with Lee Aase, currently manager of syndications and social media at Mayo, who will be one of the center’s leaders.

Here are edited excerpts from our conversation:

What does this involve?

The real focus is looking for ways to increase the use of social media throughout the practice at Mayo — to provide in-depth information for patients in a much more comprehensive way, and to create connections between researchers, physicians and staff. Up until now we’ve had the equivalent of a person and a half working through the P.R. department, and we want to take that same model to the whole enterprise at Mayo. We’ll have the equivalent of about eight full-time employees, including a medical director.

Why would a busy doctor want to spend the time to learn how to use YouTube?

This is building on the interest that we’ve already had. There is immense interest from clinical departments — they want to be able to harness these tools to do their business. We want to create a curriculum that’s scalable and enables us to provide them with training when they want it.

Can you give me an example?

We’ve done an introduction video for the head of our dental specialties department, Dr. Sreenivas Koka, with some background information — where he’s from, his history. And it talks about the things patients are looking to fix, and asks what’s most important for them. The idea is that it will make the consultations more efficient by getting the preliminaries out of the way. What Dr. Koka has found is that the patients feel they know him a little bit before they come. We want to study the impact of that — so far we’ve sent it out to a few dozen patients but we want to study it [more formally].

And you’d also offer this to other institutions, advocacy groups and other organizations?

We’ve informally been consulting and providing advice to other medical providers and organizations; now there’s a formal relationship we can have with other hospitals. We’ll charge nominal fees to cover the cost of the center. We’re planning to create a blogging platform, for example, that we may offer to other hospitals or to patient foundations.

What’s the goal?…continue reading.