Each year we’ve seen an evolution at the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network Conference that mirrors the evolution of the digital healthcare field.
In the early days, if you look at it like the Gartner hype cycle, there was a big spike of amazement. Everybody was excited. Then everybody got depressed when Facebook’s algorithms changed, and marketing plans went out the window.
Now we’re getting back to understanding where the actual opportunity lies. People are optimizing and finding the real value of digital tools. We’re venturing outside the strict confines of social media – how to use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. – into conversations around the bigger picture. Conversations like how to manage digital efforts with a small team, how to integrate CRMs, how to measure marketing efforts.
The emergence of those conversations indicates that healthcare is reaching a point of digital maturity where the tools are just tools within a larger strategic bucket. Today, unlike a couple of years ago, there’s not much delineation between CRM and social media, where one stops and the other starts. That’s allowed us to take a much more holistic view of our customer – whether it’s the patient or the caregiver or someone else – and assess how they want to connect with us across the board and not just on a particular social media platform.