Implementing Social Media For Healthcare Decision Making

Problem domain

Due to lack of public awareness in previous days the healthcare organizations were facing major operational and functional issues. The system was unable to engage the target audience to grow relationships. In addition to this, it was also not capable of demonstrate advocacy, via leadership as well as professional’s opinions. It also failed to showcase the community level activities and professional achievements. The concept of online presence through either social media or websites will help to create primary channel for connecting patients and providers. In other words, it will help to reveal personalized as well as people side healthcare providers.

It has been analyzed that, with the advent of social media platform has completely changed the way through which the consumers and the organizations communicate online. The purpose of incorporating social media platform to healthcare organizations is to increase the interaction approach and to enhance the availability of shared information. Other purpose is to increase the accessibility and widening the server access. It will also help the healthcare organizations to provide a public health surveillance and emotional support from the public community. Apart from this, it will also influence the health policies of the healthcare industries. Overall, it will support and encourage the operational and functional system of the healthcare organizations.

• Does the social media platform help to establish an interactive path between the providers and target audiences?
• How social media helps to increase public awareness?
• How social media helps to promote the existing healthy lifestyles, compliances, personal health management and decision making approaches?

There are different ways and reasons for which social media platform can be implemented in the healthcare organizations. The social media platform is projected to give abilities to both the users and provider’s ability to access data much quickly from the server without error. These websites and tools can be used to share needful data among the community. Social media improves the quality and also increases the operational efficiency of the healthcare organizations.  

The conceptual framework will provide a big picture about the importance of implementing social media platform in the healthcare industries. In order to conduct the research to reach the objectives different needful data are being collected from the sources and analyzed as well. Different tools and methods are available which is used to introduce social media platform. In this project, top down design approach is followed considering the five phases (Initiation, planning, design, execution and closure) of implementation. Apart from this, real time simulation, co-design and system architecture are followed to implement the social media platform to healthcare organization to reduce application complexity and making effective decisions.

The theoretical framework on “Implementation of social media platform in healthcare for improving decision making approaches”, It will help to give a shape to the entire topic. In order to design theoretical framework a Gantt chart, risk analysis matrix rather the complete project plan is created and discussed accordingly  the below section.  

In order to incorporate social media platform in the healthcare organization firstly its functional and operational efficiency should be analyzed. After analyzing the research topic it has been found that, for implementing this, Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) method, and agile method can be used. The Agile/Scrum method is an iterative approach which follows sequential processing.

Purpose and justification

The most effective and beneficial system design method that should be applied for implementing social media platform in the healthcare organization is top down approach. This is also known as stepwise design approach.  The system overview is formulated in this design approach through giving specification. However, this design method is unable to provide details of first level subsystems. After that each of the sub system is refined with a greater research details and in some cases in different additional subsystem level. This process progress till all the specifications are reduced to the very basic elements. As soon as the sub elements are processed the individual components are integrated all together.

• Information misuse
• Confidential data hijack

• For the healthcare organizations the list of compliance requirements includes:
• Compliance program design, implementation and tailored advancements
• Analysis of the compliance program, strength, objectives and complete effectiveness
• Standard elements of the SOX
• Compliance training
• Internal services (investigating)
• Regulatory advisory services
• Identification of target audience
• Increasing public awareness program
• Review from the due diligence

According to Mount and Martinez (2014), social media has evolved huge numbers of opportunities for the health systems. The organizations are allowed to establish connection, share discoveries and develop credibility through the application of social media platform. It has been found that the other industries are mostly focused on the number of likes they are getting from the followers whereas; the healthcare industry is focused to its impact. Moreover, it can be said that social media is focused on building trust among the patients and doctors. In other words, social media act as a referral site on the steroids. With the help of social interaction the patients will be able to possess a first impression of the healthcare industry as well as physician before professional meeting.

Hawkins, Duszak and Rawson (2014) stated that, the patients can use the social media platform to take effective decisions and research regarding the healthcare challenges and issues. Gagnon and Sabus (2015) opined that, over 70% to 75% of the United States based patients use the internet services to take healthcare advises. Among them, 40% of the patients are also relied upon the responses generated from the social media platform. This analysis report displays that, social media has become a much preferred and interactive platform for the patients to doctors, doctor to patients, doctor to doctor and patient to patient communication or interaction.

The term mount referral can be revitalized and communication barriers can be completely eliminated as soon as the healthcare organizations make themselves engaged on the social sites. Again Househ, Borycki & Kushniruk (2014) argued that, social media can promote the specific healthcare network among both the physicians and patients. The patients can also explore care approaches that must be followed by the doctors. The authority of the users and the popularity can provide huge numbers of opportunities engage consumers and also educate the patients. Live tweet is another approach that the healthcare organizations are incorporating to use hash-tags in the recent social updates. Houston, et al., (2015) stated that social media has now become a necessity for the healthcare organizations. With the strategic leverage to social media the healthcare organizations can reach the target audiences. Therefore, collectively it can be said that, social media can spring

Figure 1: work Breakdown Structure for the social media implementation project

(Source: Created by author)

Risks	Probability	Impact	Ranking (1-10)	Mitigation strategy
Privacy concern	unlikely	High	7	Privacy is referred to as one of the most important things in the healthcare industries. The system designer needs to concentrate on the security of the health record keeping system. Encryption and application firewall are the privacy mechanism or technologies should be applied to keep the access limited.  This allows only the registered users to access the information shown
Lack of training and development	Possible	Medium	5	Professional and technical training and development program is required to be used by the project managers and project team members to keep them engaged to their job roles and project requirements.
Communication barrier	Very unlikely	High	8	Using social media communication platform to take effective decisions
Limits of patient information	Very likely	Extreme		It may happen that the health record keeping system have limited   store and as a result limited amount of data are stored within it. Therefore, cloud vendor can be used by the designers to give the healthcare organizations a much storage capacity.

Task Name	Duration	Start	Finish	Predecessors	Resource Names	Cost
Project schedule development	68 days	Tue 5/22/18	Thu 8/23/18			$584.00
Project initiation	14 days	Tue 5/22/18	Fri 6/8/18			$177.00
Project scope statement development	3 days	Tue 5/22/18	Thu 5/24/18		business analyst	$30.00
Analyzing the current situation of the healthcare organization	2 days	Fri 5/25/18	Mon 5/28/18	2	Project manager, hospital stakeholder community	$45.00
Feasibility study	3 days	Tue 5/29/18	Thu 5/31/18	3	business analyst	$30.00
Budget estimation	3 days	Tue 5/29/18	Thu 5/31/18	3	Project manager	$20.00
Resource identification	2 days	Fri 6/1/18	Mon 6/4/18	4,5	decision maker	$35.00
Selecting tools and methods	4 days	Tue 6/5/18	Fri 6/8/18	6	developer	$17.00
Project planning phase	13 days	Mon 6/11/18	Wed 6/27/18			$110.00
Risk management plan	3 days	Mon 6/11/18	Wed 6/13/18	7	Project manager	$20.00
Team allocation	2 days	Thu 6/14/18	Fri 6/15/18	9	business analyst	$30.00
Stakeholder management	3 days	Mon 6/18/18	Wed 6/20/18	10	business analyst	$30.00
Contingency management plan	4 days	Thu 6/21/18	Tue 6/26/18	11	system tester	$18.00
Procurement management plan	5 days	Thu 6/21/18	Wed 6/27/18	11	technical experts	$12.00
Project execution phase	23 days	Thu 6/28/18	Mon 7/30/18			$175.00
Selection of the social platform to be implemented	3 days	Thu 6/28/18	Mon 7/2/18	12,13	Project manager	$20.00
Competitive analysis	6 days	Tue 7/3/18	Tue 7/10/18	15	business analyst	$30.00
Social media guidelines presentation	4 days	Wed 7/11/18	Mon 7/16/18	16	business analyst	$30.00
Creating social media calendar	6 days	Tue 7/17/18	Tue 7/24/18	17	hospital stakeholder community, developer, system tester	$60.00
Details double checking	4 days	Wed 7/25/18	Mon 7/30/18	18	developer, system tester	$35.00
Project monitoring phase	11 days	Tue 7/31/18	Tue 8/14/18			$60.00
Feedback collection from the patients and physicians	6 days	Tue 7/31/18	Tue 8/7/18	19	decision maker	$35.00
Change management implementation closure	5 days	Wed 8/8/18	Tue 8/14/18	21	hospital stakeholder community	$25.00
Closure phase	7 days	Wed 8/15/18	Thu 8/23/18			$62.00
Stakeholder’s signoff	2 days	Wed 8/15/18	Thu 8/16/18	22	business analyst	$30.00
Final document submission	3 days	Fri 8/17/18	Tue 8/21/18	24	Project manager	$20.00
Post maintenance plan	2 days	Wed 8/22/18	Thu 8/23/18	25	technical experts	$12.00

Figure 2: Gantt chart for the social media implementation project

(Source: Created by author)

References

Bhaskaran, N., Kumar, M., & Janodia, M. D. (2017). Use of Social Media for Seeking Health Related Information-An Exploratory Study. Journal of Young Pharmacists, 9(2).

De Choudhury, M., Morris, M. R., & White, R. W. (2014, April). Seeking and sharing health information online: comparing search engines and social media. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems(pp. 1365-1376). ACM.

Gagnon, K., & Sabus, C. (2015). Professionalism in a digital age: opportunities and considerations for using social media in health care. Physical therapy, 95(3), 406-414.

Grajales III, F. J., Sheps, S., Ho, K., Novak-Lauscher, H., & Eysenbach, G. (2014). Social media: a review and tutorial of applications in medicine and health care. Journal of medical Internet research, 16(2).

Hawkins, C. M., Duszak, R., & Rawson, J. V. (2014). Social media in radiology: early trends in Twitter microblogging at radiology’s largest international meeting. Journal of the American College of Radiology, 11(4), 387-390.

Hollis, C., Morriss, R., Martin, J., Amani, S., Cotton, R., Denis, M., & Lewis, S. (2015). Technological innovations in mental healthcare: harnessing the digital revolution. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 206(4), 263-265.

Househ, M., Borycki, E., & Kushniruk, A. (2014). Empowering patients through social media: the benefits and challenges. Health informatics journal, 20(1), 50-58.

Houston, J. B., Hawthorne, J., Perreault, M. F., Park, E. H., Goldstein Hode, M., Halliwell, M. R., … & Griffith, S. A. (2015). Social media and disasters: a functional framework for social media use in disaster planning, response, and research. Disasters, 39(1), 1-22.

Mount, M., & Martinez, M. G. (2014). Social media: A tool for open innovation. California Management Review, 56(4), 124-143.

Naidoo, D., Govender, P., Stead, M., Mohangi, U., Zulu, F., & Mbele, M. (2018). Occupational therapy students’ use of social media for professional practice. African Journal of Health Professions Education, 10(2), 101-105.

Naslund, J. A., Aschbrenner, K. A., Marsch, L. A., & Bartels, S. J. (2016). The future of mental health care: peer-to-peer support and social media. Epidemiology and psychiatric sciences, 25(2), 113-122.

Sloane, R., Osanlou, O., Lewis, D., Bollegala, D., Maskell, S., & Pirmohamed, M. (2015). Social media and pharmacovigilance: a review of the opportunities and challenges. British journal of clinical pharmacology, 80(4), 910-920.