Wednesday, December 09, 2009

Session E11 at #IHI09

Yell Eureka if u c this!

That is a message to the attendees at the session (a repeat of the one below) I am now conducting at the IHI National Forum, entitled Using Social Media to Pursue Quality and Safety. I have asked them to keep their Twitter search open for the meeting hashtag, #IHI09, as an illustration of how quickly information can flow through the social media.

This post is timed to go up at 11:25 am, just after the session starts. My blog posts automatically are fed to Twitter, and the hashtag will ensure that this post is collected by Twitter in the National Forum collection of tweets. The first person in my session to notice the tweet and yell "Eureka" will win a prize.

In the session, I will present our journey at BIDMC in the use of social media in encouraging our programs in patient safety and quality. This all started with some posts on this blog about central line infections, ventilator associated pneumonia, and hand hygiene. We discovered two things from those posts. First, the world would not come to an end if we disclosed clinical outcomes from our hospital. Second, the public presentation of these data acts as a stimulus to quality and safety improvement in the hospital. It serves to hold ourselves accountable to the standard of care we strive for.

Following publication on this blog, we moved to doing the same in a more expanded way on our corporate website. Here, you can see some of the same quality metrics, but you also see the full survey conducted by the Joint Commission when they came to accredit our hospital. Why? Well, the Joint Commission has important things to say about how well we run our place and where we should make improvements. How better for everyone in the hospital to see those things than to post them on the company website?

Each hospital has to decide for itself what degree of transparency is appropriate and comfortable, but as noted by John Toussaint here at the National Forum, it is an essential component of a culture of continuous process improvement. Social media can help spread the world.

Added later: The picture above is of the winner of the prize at this session, Mark Trahant. Congratulations!

7 comments:

  1. Great talk today Paul, appreciated hearing your thoughts on leadership, transparency, quality, and social media.

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  2. Now THAT is a slick trick - timing a post to come out just as you start speaking. Nifty!

    Gotta make sure it's not too long a post, I guess, or too fascinating, or you'd lose them. :)

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  3. You can also schedule tweets! Don't want to promote a particular service but that can be helpful too.

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  4. Yeah, HootSuite can do that, now that you mention it. (I don't mind citing a particular service. :-))

    Paul, remind us what you use to auto-tweet each post. Can you control how many characters it tweets?

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  5. I use Twitterfeed. As far as I know, it tweets the usual 140 characters all the time, but I might be wrong about that.

    I hadn't known about HootSuite, so for this contest, I just had to trust that Twitterfeed would deliver the blog at some point during my 75 minute session.

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  6. I've found Tweetlater.com to be reliable for sending a scheduled tweet (this is different than a scheduled blog post going out to Twitter via Twitterfeed).

    You can tell Tweetlater "what" and "when" to tweet (a different message each time, it doesn't let you auto-post the same thing repeatedly).

    Just another way to skin the cat for your presentation, Paul, without doing the same blog post twice on the same day.

    Tweetlater also has a feature I used of getting a daily email summary of keyword search driven tweets. Very helpful.

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  7. Ah, but the two blog posts enabled two different photos, too! :)

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