[Reblog] Use of Social Media Across US Hospitals: Descriptive Analysis of Adoption and Utilization

English: Infographic on how Social Media are being used, and how everything is changed by them. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Use of Social Media Across US Hospitals: Descriptive Analysis of Adoption and Utilization,January 29, 2015

From the post at Full Text Reports
Source: Journal of Medical Internet Research

Background:
Use of social media has become widespread across the United States. Although businesses have invested in social media to engage consumers and promote products, less is known about the extent to which hospitals are using social media to interact with patients and promote health.

Objective:
The aim was to investigate the relationship between hospital social media extent of adoption and utilization relative to hospital characteristics.

Methods:
We conducted a cross-sectional review of hospital-related activity on 4 social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and Foursquare. All US hospitals were included that reported complete data for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey and the American Hospital Association Annual Survey. We reviewed hospital social media webpages to determine the extent of adoption relative to hospital characteristics, including geographic region, urban designation, bed size, ownership type, and teaching status. Social media utilization was estimated from user activity specific to each social media platform, including number of Facebook likes, Twitter followers, Foursquare check-ins, and Yelp reviews.

Results:
Adoption of social media varied across hospitals with 94.41% (3351/3371) having a Facebook page and 50.82% (1713/3371) having a Twitter account. A majority of hospitals had a Yelp page (99.14%, 3342/3371) and almost all hospitals had check-ins on Foursquare (99.41%, 3351/3371). Large, urban, private nonprofit, and teaching hospitals were more likely to have higher utilization of these accounts.

Conclusions:
Although most hospitals adopted at least one social media platform, utilization of social media varied according to several hospital characteristics. This preliminary investigation of social media adoption and utilization among US hospitals provides the framework for future studies investigating the effect of social media on patient outcomes, including links between social media use and the quality of hospital care and services.

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[Reblog] Keeping Elders Out of Hospitals as Much as Possible

From the December 4, 2013 post  by Marti Weston at As Our Parents Age

 

Anyone who has spent time with an elder parent in the hospital knows just how easy it is for one problem to be solved only to have the person discharged with different problems. This is not necessarily the fault of the medical caregivers or the hospital itself — it’s a result of a system that puts older people into beds and keeps them there. Add in bed alarms, the inability to move much, and that hospitals isolate elder patients from their routines and support communities, and you have a recipe for unsuccessful care, a result of age associated hospital complications.

So I recommend reading The Hospital is No Place for the Elderly, a November 20, 2013 article that appeared in the The Atlantic. This piece aptly illustrates the conundrum of frail elderly patients with chronic health issues admitted to hospitals where medical care focuses primarily on fixing acute health problems. The difficulty is that most of frail elders’ medical issues cannot be fixed — but the quality of their lives can improve. Author Jonathan Rauch also describes several programs in the United States — teams of physicians, nurses, and other health professionals — that collaborate to keep patients as healthy as possible and out of the hospital. The teams even save money.

Many team-based support programs for frail elders run deficits, despite that they are so successful, but Rauch reports that the climate is changing, as Medicare and some insurance companies develop a more welcoming attitude toward innovative health care programs. The Affordable Care Acthas designated money to support innovative and new models of care delivery. (To learn more about other innovative programs you might also want to read Atul Gwande’s 2011 New Yorker article about changing models of medical care.)

One of the most interesting parts of The Atlantic article was the description of the team meetings where participants collaborate and coordinate patients’ medical care in order to help elders stay as healthy as possible.

Best Atlantic Article Quotes

• The idea is simple: rather than wait until people get sick and need hospitalization, you build a multidisciplinary team that visits them at home, coordinates health-related services, and tries to nip problems in the bud.
• These people aren’t on death’s doorstep, but neither will they recover. Physically (and sometimes cognitively), they are frail…
• Patients were presented not as bundles of syndromes—as medical charts—but as having personal goals, such as making a trip or getting back on their feet. The team tries to think about meeting patients’ goals rather than performing procedures.

 

 

Related articles

• One-third of older adults admitted to ICU deemed “frail” (medicalnewstoday.com)
• Elderly patients are at risk of readmission after hospital stays (express.co.uk)

What is observation care? Clearing up common misperceptions

From the 4 February 2013 article at KevinMD.com

o treat observation care as simply a loophole that allows hospitals to avoid the Medicare penalties from readmissions — as Brad Wright, an assistant professor of health management and policy at the University of Iowa did earlier this month — is to take a short-sighted approach to a complex health issue.

 

Observation care in fact aims to address several of healthcare’s thorniest challenges head on. In the process, a well-run observation unit can not only help reduce hospital readmission rates, but it can reduce crowding and speed throughput in the ER, save patients an extended first hospital admission (let alone a re-admission), and perhaps most importantly, improve patient outcomes.

To see how, and to clear any misconceptions some like Wright could have about observation care, it might be helpful to do some Q&A.

…

 

Read the entire article here

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• Can Patient-Centered Care Reduce Hospital Readmissions? (healthblawg.typepad.com)
• The Relationship Between Discharging Patients From the Hospital Too Early and the Likelihood of a 30 Day Readmission: Treat, Street and Repeat. (diseasemanagementcareblog.blogspot.com)
• D. Brad Wright: Penalizing Hospitals for Re-admissions: Will It Work? (huffingtonpost.com)
• Positive nursing environments reduce readmissions (medicalstaffingnetwork.wordpress.com)

 

FCC seeks to change regulation of corporate interests disclosures on TV news (including local hospital segments on the news)

Those health news segments on the local news might not be as unbiased as they appear!

From the 3 January 2012 Washington Post article by Paul Farhi

V newscasts are increasingly seeded with corporate advertising masquerading as news — and the federal government wants to do something about it.

Concerned that subtle “pay-for-play” marketing ploys are seeping into the news, the Federal Communications Commission has proposed a regulation that would require the nation’s 1,500 commercial TV stations to disclose online the corporate interests behind the news….

…

“Unless you stick around for the end credits, you’re unlikely to know it’s payola,” said Corie Wright, senior policy counsel for Free Press, a media watchdog group backing the FCC proposal. “If broadcasters were required to put it online, you could check to see if it was actually sponsored or not.”

The proposed regulation is aimed at news programs that appear to viewers to be the work of independent journalists, but in fact sponsors have shaped or even dictated the coverage.

A common form of advertiser-supplied content, documented in a recent Washington Post article, is a live interview segment in which a seemingly neutral reviewer recommends a series of products that the “reviewer” has been paid by sponsors to mention. Stations across the country have also brokered “exclusive” relationships with local hospitals in which the hospitals pay the station to be featured in health stories.  [my emphasis] Other stations have aired “news” programs that feature interviews with sponsors who’ve paid for the privilege.

According to an FCC report, many stations also use “video news releases,” footage produced by a sponsor or corporate interest that looks like it was shot by the station.

Under current law, such arrangements aren’t illegal,

 

Top 10 musts for your hospital visit

From an August 2011 posting by MITCHELL BROOKS, MD  in KevinMD.com

 Whether you are going to the hospital for an outpatient procedure or whether you will be admitted to the hospital for medical illness or surgical procedure, there are certain things you must know and certain things you must do in order to ensure that your reasonable expectations will be met….

 

Read the article (with the list of 10) here

 

CMS Launches Tools and Initiatives to Help Improve American Health Care Quality

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced a new tool for patients and caregivers, and other enhanced initiatives, to empower consumers to make informed choices about their health care, and to help improve the quality of care in America’s hospitals, nursing homes, physician offices, and other health care settings.

From the  5 August 2011 press release

“These tools are new ways CMS is making sure consumers have information about health care quality and important information they need to make the best decisions about where to receive high-quality care,” said Dr. Don Berwick, the CMS Administrator.  “These efforts are designed to also encourage providers to deliver safe, patient-centered care that consumers can rely on and will motivate improvement across our health care system.”

The steps announced today include:

·       A Quality Care Finder to provide consumers with one online destination to access all of Medicare’s Compare tools — comparison information on hospitals, nursing homes and plans: www.Medicare.gov/QualityCareFinder.

·       An updated Hospital Compare website, which now includes data about how well hospitals protect outpatients from surgical infections and whether hospitals care for outpatients who are treated for  suspected heart attacks with proven therapies that reduce death: www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov

Read the entire press release 

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• U.S. health care system fails to deliver – Same Story The World Over… (earlsview.com)