Misusing social media is the ninth of the 10 risks to home health agencies, highlighted by the Texas Association for Home Care and Hospice and Liles Parker PLLC.
Social media is an accessible medium that provides organizations opportunities to directly market and connect with specific audiences. According to Merrily Orsini, owner of a nationally recognized aging care marketing firm, “When social media is effectively leveraged, it can be an extremely powerful educational and informative tool.” Patients and their loved ones can utilize social media as a resource in evaluating and selecting agencies and best practices to ensure quality care.
Social media can complement healthcare in a variety of ways, including fostering professional connections, communicating effectively with patients and loved ones and educating consumers and healthcare professionals on important industry issues.
Though it is a convenient method of communication and connection, a line between appropriate and inappropriate or fraudulent can sometimes be very thin or blurry.
Four major social media-related risks and liabilities for home health organizations are:
- Accidental disclosure of protected patient information
- Inefficient use of time and resources with little return on investment
- Reputation damage resulting from negative comments, especially on platforms without the option to remove such comments
- Untimely/Inappropriate correspondence with patients or family members
Regulators have recently reemphasized differences between marketing firms and reputation-enhancement companies. Hiring a marketing firm to develop educational materials and promote products is clearly defined as advertising and acceptable, whereas hiring a reputation-enhancement firm to utilize skilled bloggers for the purpose of generating positive but false comments is misleading and fraudulent.
For example, earlier this year, the New York Attorney General announced that nearly 20 firms were fined a total of $350,000 for commissioning fake reviews through reputation-enhancement companies on platforms like Citysearch, Google, Yahoo and Yelp.
All home health agencies should proceed with caution when developing social media strategies, and they should clearly define and understand differentiators between advertising and misleading reputation-enhancement opportunities.
In the final post of this series, we will address staffing challenges.
