Last week there was some discussion on Twitter about a Deloitte Centre for Health Solutions report called Social Networks in Health Care: Communication, collaboration and insights. It is a U.S. report that looks at the use of social media in various parts of U.S. health care sectors including patient groups, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, physicians, cancer centers, and government. It is a fairly high level discussion but it does conclude that the social media pickup by health care in the giant to the south of us, is growing steadily.  
How do we rank up here? Not great I'd say but a lot of notes on Twitter and in my Inbox has given me a little more insight into what is out there. If you go to http://www.genomealberta.ca/blogs/Mikenomics_.aspx you'll see  several blog entries outlining some of what I've found so far and as promised here is a little more to add.
The Sick Kids Foundation has a Flickr page at http://www.flickr.com/photos/sickkidsfoundation  For those still grappling with the myriad of social media sites out there, Flickr is a photo sharing site where you can share pictures of you, your family, company, association or just about anything else you can think of. We use Picasa for Genome Alberta photos (which right now includes some of the early entries into our digital art contest ) but the idea is pretty much the same. They have a YouTube channel with some good videos in there. We have linked or embedded some of the videos as part of our GenOmics stories but not all the videos have embedding enabled. Not a great idea in the social media world unless you have a pretty good reason.  Sick Kids - The Hospital has a Twitter account at @SickKidsNews and there is an account for Building SickKids at @Build_SickKids  AND SickKids Foundation is out there at @sickkids . So if you want to find out what is going on at Sick Kids you have lots of options - probably too many options because I do my best to follow what I can keep up with effectively and if I was interested in Sick Kids, that is too many to add to the list for one place.

I received a comment from Toronto Rehab that drives home something any organization needs to think about as they create their social media strategy. Content. You need dynamic content to keep people coming back to you whether it is your web site, Facebook pages, or an internal site. To create the content you need people and that is where the rubber hits the proverbial road. Creating new content is time consuming. Doctors, clinicians, and researchers are busy people noted David Akermanis from Toronto Rehab, and our experience here at Genome Alberta echoes that, so you can't just walk down the hall and ask for a posting or an interview. On our GenOmics site we chose to integrate other news sources to maintain content people want to come back to, and there are a host of tools and analytics you can find to make it easier. In the end though it takes time and people to write the material and keep it relevant.

Another social media tool that was brought to my attention are Care Pages at http://www.carepages.com/  These pages can be set up by anyone, seem to be secure and are not necessarily public. They allow patients to share stories, support each other and can be used in conjunction with any hospital or hosptital stay. You can see an example  from Stollery Children's Hospital in Edmonton but here is a screen shot as well:

Care Pages is a social media like service offered out of the U.S. but once a hospital, clinic or individual has it up and running on their own site then it becomes a tool for the users. The content doesn't show up on Google searches which affords some anonymity, there is password protection and you need to invite people to share information. The result is a personal website where the patient/family can share thoughts, post pictures, send messages, and provides the ability to say "thank you" to a staff member who has gone the norm. There are blogs, forums, articles, and message boards, but each user creates their own web site and they decide who they wish to share. It is free to the user but I suspect there is a charge to the hospital if they decide to implement a full up Care Pages service - it is hard to tell from the main Care Pages. They claim 625 U.S. and Canadian healthcare facilities have setup Care Pages.

I guess the next step in the health care and social media quest is to look at Canadian pharmaceutical companies. Any ideas on people and place to start?