So since in my day job I spend time tweeting for a health care organization I thought I would touch base on the questions I’m getting from administration and risk management about HIPPA and other potentially legal sticking points for the conservative health care industry. I have been reading a white paper called “Risk Management in the Age of Twitter” from the ECRI Institute and have found it to be rather interesting.
For my part, I think that there needs to be a bit of common sense applied to what you do in Social Media when it comes to protecting a patient’s right to privacy or even just in terms of keeping important company information confidential. This protection must also extend outside of the hospital or the work place. Just as health care workers know that they can’t speak about a patient’s condition or identify a patient outside of work and should only discuss the patient with other health care workers who have a need to know about the patient the same holds true with Social Media.
At this point we are applying the use of good judgement for our Social Media policy, but because all good health care companies must develop a policy I am helping to shape that. Some key things that it should and should not do are:
- The policy should NOT discourage people from using Social Media.
- The policy should allow your organization to be nimble, you can’t wait for all comments and posts to be approved by legal.
- The policy should be a simple extension of existing personal conduct policies.
- The policy should NOT try to police all conversations. Some things just have to happen in order to be true to the medium.
The bottom line is that you probably already have existing policies that can be modified to include social media. Just make sure that your modifications don’t discourage people from using these powerful communications tools to help spread your company’s message.
