hospitals and social media

The New York Times had an article yesterday about the growing trend of hospitals using various types of social media to reach potential patients. In the past, hospitals have been quite conservative about marketing and advertising, but now you can find hospitals posting videos of surgeries on youtube, surgeons twittering during surgery, and patients blogging about their care at a hospital.

Hospitals see social media outlets as a cheap way to reach out to potential patients, who are increasingly doing more research and comparing hospitals for treatment, rather than simply going where the doctors sends them. But ethicists quoted in the NYT article raise some important questions, not just about patient privacy concerns, but also about the responsibilities hospitals have regarding how they represent themselves. Do these videos and other outreaches paint too rosy a picture of medical care at a given facility? Do hospitals have an obligation to disclose on the video what can go wrong during a procedure? There are also serious questions about using social networking sites to recruit volunteers for clinical trials. After reading the article, I would add questions about whether patients might be coerced into allowing a physician to broadcast a procedure or to give a positive review for a web video.

The article raises important questions. What do you think? What ethical questions should hospital consider when thinking about social marketing strategies?