Health Care

How a health care organization scales social media across 23,000+ employees while successfully navigating HIPAA regulations

By partnering with the best applications, integrations, tools, and resources available, the Hootsuite ecosystem gives global organizations the power of choice, depth of integration, and expertise to scale. This thriving ecosystem is made up of over 100 app integrations, technology partners, agencies, and solution partners.

Michael Yoder and Kristin Coppens, Social Media Specialist at Spectrum Health, work together as a center of excellence, overseeing all communications for a dozen social media contributors across the hospital network. Working with Hootsuite’s Professional Services, their dashboards are set up to mirror a hub and spoke business model, with them at the centre. This lets them monitor all contributor-conversations, assign messages, pull reports, and approve or decline scheduled messages.

Instead of relying on one single vendor to support the organization and entrust security measures, Spectrum Health uses Hootsuite’s ecosystem to handpick the best applications, integrations, and tools for them.

For example, Spectrum Health is required to respond to all direct inquiries within 24 hours. But because the dozen contributors across the various hospitals aren’t dedicated to managing social media, Michael monitors for communications through Hootsuite and Brandwatch. Setting up listening streams and notifications via Brandwatch, Michael is notified as soon as an inquiry comes in and assigns it to the correct contributor—for example, the Children’s Hospital answers most pediatrics-related questions.

With an organization of 23,000 employees and only two people corporately responsible for the whole system, having centralized control is essential.

Now with Hootsuite, all of their social administrators are on one dashboard, giving Yoder the ability to track, analyze, and report on the platform unlike ever before:

• Responds to inquiries within required 24 hours

• Remains compliant with HIPAA regulations

• Engages in social conversations to dispel health rumors and share trusted knowledge

• Integrates Nexgate HIPAA compliance and security monitoring across every social channel for 12 hospitals

Today, monitoring for compliance can be automated through Hootsuite and partner integrations. This frees up Michael and Kristin to improve strategies, support contributors, and build communities by sourcing and sharing relevant, trustworthy content. They were able to achieve all of this because of Hootsuite’s open ecosystem.For example, Kristin recently hosted a “Sun Safety” Twitter chat, where she used Hootsuite’s Content Library to pull all questions, answers, and fast facts to sort and publish in the chat. By monitoring the #SunSafety hashtag in-stream, she sourced new questions and comments, fueling the conversation. Keeping everything consistent means that she can do more campaigns like this to engage and educate followers.