Privacy Regulations Bedevil Medical Social Media Efforts

User-generated content is an essential component of social media. To truly participate in social media, healthcare organizations need to allow other people to leave comments on the organizations' content. But that's difficult to reconcile with HIPAA and other government privacy regulations, leaving healthcare providers juggling hand grenades in their online participation.I talked with DazMedia, a New Jersey digital agency providing promotional, marketing, education, and salesforce training, about the privacy problems of doing healthcare business on social media, and how they overcome those problems.

HIPAA and other regulations require companies to control how private clinical data gets shared on the Internet, and to report complaints about drugs promptly to the FDA.

"Because communications are so highly regulated, there are lots of things you can do with a consumer product that you just can't do here," said Michael Rowe, chief strategic officer for Daz. For example, a pharma company might want to post a public blog to discuss a new treatment for a condition. If they leave comments open, and someone reports harmful side-effects, that has to be reported to the FDA. This is a major reason pharma companies have been reluctant to use social media. "If they opened it up completely, the reporting requirements would require an entire department of people," he said.

Companies can manage those regulatory requirements by focusing on specific conditions, rather than treatments for those conditions. Don't start a community to focus on a specific treatment for osteoarthritis, start a community for the condition itself, which will be more likely to receive discussion on general subjects, like finding doctors, and questions to look for. Also, companies can share sponsorship of sites--or, even better, find existing communities online and buy ads on that site, thus keeping the relationship at arm's length. One example of such a community is Lotsa Helping Hands, for caregivers.

Companies can also navigate regulatory requirements by creating content that can be shared on social media, such as embeddable videos. These videos would include one-on-one interviews with patients, or town-hall style meetings where questions are vetted in advance for regulatory compliance.

One potent area for online marketing is casual gaming, such as a Concentration-style game that enforces a brand. Casual gaming appeals to women, who are generally the decision-makers on medical care in a household. "The husband goes through the wife, the wife nags him and says he's got to see a doctor," said Daz Connell, CEO of the company.

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