By Thom Wellington

No matter how hard you work at excellence, one mistake can be amplified on social media and take you down. Today, there are more devices connected to the Internet than the number of humans on earth. It seems that a communication device is always within reach, and people are eager to share both good and bad stories with anyone who will listen.

Social media is the collective of online communication channels dedicated to community- based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration, including Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and health care-specific platforms such as HealthGrades. Social media is word-of-mouth on steroids. Stories that used to take years to reach large audiences now can go viral in mere seconds. It is expected that one-third of hospitals open today will close by 2020 due to poor customer service, low patient satisfaction scores and greater transparency of hospital performance. Hospital records are more easily available as a result of high readmission numbers and increased infection rates. As stories disseminate, damage can occur quickly. For example:



An elderly father lies in his bed on the fifth floor of a hospital’s intensive care unit receiving care after having a complicated surgery. While being treated, construction workers are two floors above him repairing drywall. The father quickly recovers and is sent home to get some rest. Weeks later, the same man is readmitted to the hospital for an unexplained infection. His daughter posted her dismay on social media when she found out her father developed a fatal infection from mishandled treatment at a health care facility. She complained to the medical staff at the facility and also started sending messages to her family members on social media. The posts included a photo of her father’s wounds and how disgruntled she was at the hospital. Other people saw these posts online and added their own complaints about the hospital — for everything from bad nursing to inaccurate billing. And so the hospital’s reputation was damaged on several levels, due to one lady unleashing her anger concerning her father’s care for the world to see.

Repercussions similar to this can happen to any health care provider if a potentially life-threatening situation is not handled properly and efficiently. When a negative experience or unfriendly diagnosis presents itself, such as getting a health care-acquired infection (HAI), patients and family members are typically quick to spread the news on a multitude of sites. As information leaks out about patient HAIs, it can have a sudden negative financial impact on the hospital. Before social media, hospitals were able to settle cases and include a quiet clause that required the plaintiff to not discuss the case or the settled outcome.

Of course, some of the reviews are positive and glowing for the hospital, but you will see some that may scare patients away or make them think twice about choosing that particular hospital. Fortunately, due to the instantaneous information presented on social media platforms, a health care company can respond directly to its consumers to shed light on the matter.

Patients entering your facility may be armed with social media as a weapon, but this interaction should ensure patients and family members that their criticism was heard and recognized by the provider. Health care systems should leverage marketing platforms as an inexpensive tool in building strong connections with its communities and increasing patient satisfaction. HAIs are seen as preventable infections and are often caused by unsatisfactory hospital conditions or human error, triggering the general public to be less forgiving to the individual employee in charge. Social media gives providers a chance to establish more efficient and open lines of communication with patients.

Although no one is immune from this virtual approach, a good way to handle these situations is to have someone monitoring posts and responding. Developing a list of concise responses that will direct social media posters to the health system’s customer service line, instead of publically displaying their negative comments online, can prepare and prevent hospitals from having to deal with a media crisis. It is important to act quickly since social medial is real-time communication. You can quickly dilute the impact of negative postings by proactively providing positive feedback in a timely manner.

About the author: Thom Wellington is the CEO and a stockholder in Infection Control University, a company that provides staff training programs and control processes for infectious microorganisms in hospitals, clinics, long-term care facilities and other health care-related institutions.