Social Media and Healthcare

Ever doctor who is “in” is now using facebook pages to improve communication with patients. Though the number of facebook apps available to do this is in the well over 100,000, too many for physician to look through.

Start here to build out the tools for your medical practice. The goal of every doctor using facebook pages is to give information to new and existing patients, also get patients to engage with the physician in a social supportive way.

Below are five essential Facebook apps.

1. Twitter Tab — Display Your Twitter Feed

Twitter Tab, which has 1+ million monthly active users, will create a tab on your Facebook Page that displays a timeline of your medical practices most recent tweets. This is a great feature for providing additional, real-time information to Facebook patients and medical staff who don’t have a Twitter account and for avoiding the annoyance your fans would feel if you were to constantly stream your tweets to Facebook as wall updates. The app is very easy to set up.

2. Static HTML: iframe Tabs — Create a Custom Landing Page

Static HTML: iframe tabs, which has 61+ million monthly users, will simplify the process of making a custom landing page by automating many of the steps. Forget about creating a developer account and your own application — this app provides copy and paste textboxes for your custom HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It also offers checkboxes to remove the scrollbars. If you want to incentivize Likes on your Page, the application enables you to “like-gate,” and show different content to those who have and haven’t “liked” your page.

It’s worth noting that you will still need to host your own files, and designs over 520 pixels wide and 800 pixels tall will have the scrollbars.

3. EHR online facebook scheduling — Place you free appointment schedule on Facebook

Let patients schedule appointments in a HIPAA compliant way!  Use the Static HTML iframe Tabs to get this done.

Step by step instructions on how to do this can be found here: http://blog.drchrono.com/facebook/can-facebook-have-a-ehr-yes/

4. ContactMe — Add a Contact Form

ContactMe, with 180,000 monthly active users, adds a tab on your organization’s Facebook Page with a contact form. This allows anyone visiting your Facebook page to easily get in touch with you at the very moment when they’re most interested.

The biggest advantage of this app is its customization options. You can choose whether you’d prefer to show your company’s contact information or social media icons for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Skype. This is very customizable.

5. RSS Graffiti – Automatically Post Updates

RSS Graffiti, with 1.5 million monthly users, allows you to automatically post wall updates any time there’s a new item in one of your specified feeds. For example, if you publish to a medical blog every day, RSS Graffiti can automatically post an excerpt of the article with a direct link onto your Facebook page’s wall. That saves you the time and effort of creating a new wall update every day to distribute your company’s content.

It has customization options making it stand out. You can automatically post more than one RSS feed, adjust how the post looks when published, schedule how often the feed is checked, and specify how many posts should be published per check. And most importantly, with all these options and more, the configuration interface is still easy to use and intuitive.