It is rare to find a healthcare organisation or service in Australia that is embracing the potential of digital media.
At a recent conference, Damon Klotz, digital media strategist at the private hospitals group Ramsay Health Care, described some of the steps involved in the “digital transformation” of his company.
I wonder how many other health care organisations have “digital media strategists”. If you know of any, please tell.
It might also be interesting to know what distinguishes digital-embracers (whether individuals or organisations) from the digital-wary.
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Leading a global hospital group down the digital path
Damon Klotz writes:
At the inaugural Informa Social Media in Health Care conference in Sydney recently, I was asked to present a case study on what we have achieved at Ramsay Health Care in the digital space over the past 10 months.
In front of a diverse audience brought together because of a common interest in social media, I covered the design process for our social media policy, how to educate a global workforce who don’t have regular access to computers at work, and how we manage a 24/7 online presence which covers multiple time zones.
You can see my slides here.
Social media policy
I started off by talking about our social media policy and how we collaborated with several different parts of the organisation during its development.
After our policy was approved, I started to work on the communication strategy behind it to ensure that it reached our global workforce, in a way that reached everyone and not just those with access to a computer at work.
We decided that the best way to do this was to put together a short video that covered the essentials of the social media policy and answered any FAQs that were identified during the feedback process of developing the policy.
This video received great feedback from the audience and, although it would have been nice to outsource it to a creative agency to put together a video with all the bells & whistles, the audience agreed that our video gets the message across clearly. All we used were the free tools that we already had at our disposal.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-xo0237n6U[/youtube]
Staff education
The education of our workforce has been a key aspect of my role since I started with Ramsay. As the majority of our workforce doesn’t have regular access to computers, we ensured that face-to-face training was apart of our education strategy. I’ve had the opportunity to visit hospitals throughout Australia to train our staff about social media in health care.
I’ve also spent some time focusing on the education of our executives to not only bring them up to speed with what we are doing in the social media space, but also to win them over about the importance of social media for their individual hospital.
This has seen me doing several presentations on topics such as social media monitoring for hospitals, and providing some context for them by teaching our executives how to use twitter to participate in conversations such as #qanda on a Monday night.
Providing context to the tools has been far more effective then just saying social media is important and that’s why we are using it.
Using social media for recruitment
Something that I’m passionate about is the use of social media for recruitment and branding.
Not only are we setting up a presence for Ramsay Health Care on social media but we are trying to create a truly social organisation.
We are doing this by empowering our employees to act as ‘brandvocates’ in the online space. It has been a really effective way to communicate externally why Ramsay is a great place to work.
This campaign has grown organically and has seen the hash tag develop over time, along with user generated content on our facebook page and the development of our very own
On the video, several of our nurses answer questions about why they chose to be a nurse and what they love about the profession, to inspire our next generation of nurses.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO3WHqiHz_I[/youtube]
The video was even filmed and edited by one of our nurses.
Summary
The feedback from the talk was really positive and our work has been described as the biggest whole organisation digital transformation that has been seen in healthcare in Australia to date.
Several other health organisations had said that they’d been waiting for someone else to take the lead in this space before dipping their toes in the water first.
We are only at the beginning of a digital revolution for the healthcare community and it’s an exciting time to be working at the heart of it.
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