As more hospitals and medical centers join Facebook and Twitter, developing a social media policy may be topping more agendas.
Luckily, there are guidelines pioneered by big-name centers such as The Cleveland Clinic and Massachusetts General Hospital, so other institutions have models to follow.
Policies tend to set the bounds of employees' online interactions as well as provide a "terms of use" agreement with patients and other participants.
At the top of the list of considerations when drafting such a policy is privacy, according to Donita Boddie, director of public affairs for Mass. General, who helped develop the center's policy.
"Patient privacy is always first and foremost," Boddie told MedPage Today, adding that employees need to be mindful of HIPAA even when they're using their avatars.
Joe Milicia, senior public relations manager at the Cleveland Clinic, said privacy also topped their list of concerns: "We needed to make sure that we covered our most essential responsibilities before we could begin exploring the positive potential of these interactive channels," he told MedPage Today.
That concern is reflected high up in the Cleveland Clinic guidelines, which prohibit users from posting "any content that is personal health information, including patient images."
Both centers' guidelines also make it immediately clear that participating in social media doesn't create a physician-patient relationship, and that it by no means is an official offering of medical advice.
Boddie and Milicia said taking a team-based approach to development of these guidelines was essential. Both teams involved the marketing, public relations, human resources, and legal departments; Cleveland Clinic also invited some clinicians to participate, while Mass. General worked with their nursing department and the information systems team.
Having social media policy models from other healthcare organizations was also key in informing their own policies. Milicia said the Cleveland Clinic even looked at models from other companies outside of healthcare for a wider perspective.
Ed Bennett, manager of web operations at the University of Maryland Medical Center, has a pretty comprehensive list of medical center social media policies on his blog, and the Mayo Clinic's heavyweight Center for Social Media offers these two blog posts as a jumping-off point for policy development groups.
Boddie said the most important part of developing a guideline is that it works for the organization that's developing it: "You have to figure out what's best for your institution. There's no one template that works for everyone."