Journal of International Technology and Information Management
Article Title
Analyzing Social Media Implementation in Hospitals in the U.S. Midwest Region
Abstract
The purpose of this research is to explore to what scale hospitals are adopting social media and implementing it with respect to the hospital characteristics. We conducted a review of the hospitals’ social media activity on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. We studied all the 912 hospitals in the Midwest region reported in the 2015 American Hospital Association annual survey data. We reviewed the social networking websites of these hospitals to understand the scale of social media adoption relative to the hospital characteristics such as bed count, state, ownership type(control), specialty(service), whether the hospital is in a network, and whether the hospital is a physician-owned or not. We determined the utilization with the data from user activity on each different social networking platform such as likes on Facebook, followers on Twitter and Instagram, and subscribers on YouTube. More than 80% of the hospitals have their presence on at least one social networking website but the utilization depends on many factors of the hospitals' characteristics. We observed that hospitals in Ohio, government-owned, children’s specialty hospitals with more full-time registered nurses have higher social media utilization.