Effective use of Social Media for enterprises is becoming more and more impressive. A lot of enterprises are either evaluating or debating on how to effectively use social media for business benefits.

Being part of the healthcare IT space, I wanted to analyze the benefits of using social media in the healthcare sector. Here is a small list which I came up with and I would appreciate if it can be extended by the readers through experience and innovation.

Enterprise Twitter

Twitter has already taken the world by swing and enterprise twitter for healthcare is a very useful application in my opinion. Typically physicians and other healthcare professionals are always under strict timelines. Updating useful information on the move is a wonderful idea.

For e.g. If there is a patient visit re-scheduled the reception can alert the physician through a tweet immediately.

If there is an emergency and a set of individuals are to be intimated, twittering the message makes it a convenient option.

General awareness campaigns whenever required can be carried out easily through an enterprise twitter kind of platform.

Social Presence for Brand Building

Like every other enterprise, brand building is an important aspect in Healthcare as well. Having social presence will significantly improve brand building exercise for the institution. Institutions can market new services and solutions during social interactions. Focused awareness campaigns and informational sessions would further strengthen institutions brand.

Enterprise Social Network Platform

While external social network platform act as catalysts to improve brand building, healthcare institutions can significantly increase their patient relationship management and collaborations with different stake holders within and surrounding the healthcare set-up by maintaining their own enterprise social network set-up.

SaaS based PHR

With preventive care becoming more and more important with the patients, sharing personal health record information is becoming increasingly critical. The next generation Software as a service model can be leveraged to share patients personal health record information through secure web based interfaces.

Test Reporting over Mobile or Collaborative Platforms

Next generation mobile and collaborative platforms can be leveraged to transfer various medical reports to the patients. While patient physical presence might be required for some of the medical reports, there are a lot of such reports, whose information can be transmitted to the patient over mobile. Information transmission becomes easier and faster and at the same time it is convenient for both the healthcare institutions and patients.

I am sure there will be many more scenarios where social media and next generation Information technology solutions will be useful in the healthcare vertical. I would be pleased to get more inputs from others.