Behavioral Health Integrator

Join the HITEQ Center for a webinar on how to develop a social media strategy to improve your health center’s HIV prevention and care outreach. Using the POST (People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology) method, attendees learned how to use social media more efficiently to reach your target audiences. We also reviewed social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, their uses and differences. Attendees received recommendations for social media management and graphic design tools at the end of the discussion. 

Maintaining a good name in the digital era is becoming increasingly important as social media tools and platforms continue to expand the services they offer. As a health center, having a professional social media presence is becoming an influential channel in which to engage patient populations.

A Health Center’s online reputation plays an ever-growing role in client satisfaction, as 6 out of 10 patients use online patient reviews before selecting a physician. This webinar and related handouts recommend three specific steps to managing your reputation online to improve patient engagement.

There are thousands of consumer health applications (health apps), which run on smartphones, watches, tablets, and other mobile devices. These Health Apps are available for download for general consumers, patients, and healthcare professionals. Currently, there is no governmental agency that provides certification or guidance on health apps, although there are several projects from organizations such as HL7, the FDA, ONC, and OCR that are working to provide guidance. User discrepancy in terms of the validity and safety of the health apps they choose to use are primarily based on ratings or recommendations. This guide seeks to provide a health app decision tree that can assist medical professionals and consumers in making wise choices when using health apps.

This article written by Dr. John Halamka, CIO at Harvard Medical School and a Health IT adoption thought-leader, provides examples from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center on best practices for healthcare providers in trying to manage social media efforts.