Why the CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital Loves His Blog

Blog 10/20/09:

Because so few experts comment on marketing (let alone blogging) for veterinary practices, I sometimes turn to pundits in human medicine for insight.

Blog World Expo 2009, now only in it’s third year, created an entire category just for “medbloggers,” or bloggers serving the medical industry.  I was fortunate to attend several sessions that focused the use of blogging in hospitals and health care.

In “How Hospitals Make Best Use of Their Blogs,” Gary Schitzer, publisher of Health News Review.org, an online site that rates the accuracy and ethics of the big news health news stories of the week, moderated a panel that included two visionaries in medicine today.  His guests were Paul Levy, the CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Hospital in Boston and Marc Monseau, director of corporate media relations at Johnson & Johnson. (I included only one of Marc Monseau’s comments below.)

Find Paul Levy’s blog at:  www.runningahospital.blogspot.com.
Find Marc Manseau’s blog at: www.jnjbtw.com

GS:  With the number of tasks that need to be tackled in a typical week, why do you use some of that time to blog?

PL:  If you’re the CEO of the hospital, part of the job is to represent your institution in the community. The blog is an efficient way of doing that. The blog works better than the usual PR routes, in fact, because without blogs, hospital directors were stuck with using the press as a means to reach our community, and reporters and editors filter what we say. They can manipulate our words and that’s aggravating.

GS:  In the time that you’ve been blogging, what’s been the post or event that you feel the best about?

PL:  Actually, it was one that led to a dramatic increase in transparency for our organization. We had asked our staff to work hard to drive down the number of central line infections. I started posting the infection rates month by month. This blog is open to staff, patients and the public, so it was a bit of a risk.

We found it was all to the good, however. Staff worked harder and then began to be proud that the infection rates were dropping which lead to even harder work in preventing infections. At this point our central line infection rate is close to zero.

The other great result: those posts helped the public see us as a transparent organization. We were constantly posting what measures we were taking to drive down those infection rates. Other hospitals are still afraid to do that for obvious reasons. We were admitting we had an issue, but just that we were working hard to battle it helped our image rise in the community. We are now viewed as the most transparent hospital as far as medical outcomes and what we’re doing to improve them.

GS: What happens when you make a factual or other small mistake in a blog?

PL: It gets corrected within about thirty seconds of when I send the blog! I fix it quick.

GS: What more significant errors do you think you’ve made since you started blogging?

PL:  The thing that I regret most is when people have submitted comments that were a bit sarcastic or hostile, I would sometimes respond in kind, as opposed to staying above the fray. I realized I was letting that person define the tone as opposed to the kind of tone I was trying to maintain in the blog. I’ve gotten better at that.

GS: Does blogging seem cost effective to you?

MM:  Initially when we started the blog it was an extremely low cost investment. It was just a matter of time, putting someone on the job to set up the blog and then keep it going with posts. In terms of getting something that shows value, we’ve done that ten times over.

The J & J Health Channel gets one million views in a year. How many of those one million go out and buy the product directly because of our posts and videos? I don’t care. J&J’s product is also its trustworthiness and good information. It’s starting a conversation, hearing great questions from readers. With the blog, we’re promoting J&J as a trusted source of health care info. That’s our ROI, but it’s not always in dollars and cents.

Find Paul Levy’s blog at:  www.runningahospital.blogspot.com.
Find Marc Manseau’s blog at: www.jnjbtw.com