As it seems to be doing in every other facet of life, social media is invading the health care industry. Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and others, as well as electronic newsletters, are making themselves known throughout Miami Valley health care agencies.

But The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, more commonly know by the acronym HIPAA, controls a good deal of the content that health care sites can post on the popular pages.

“Health care is probably a little slower to react to the movements of social media because there are so many patient privacy issues that you have to respect,” said Tim Cloonan, director of marketing and communications for Miami Valley Hospital. “We have a Facebook page here at Miami Valley, as do our other hospitals (Atrium, Upper Valley and Good Samaritan). That primarily is used to reach out to patients and families for sharing events that we have — any type of special information about care that we provide for a particular service line, like heart or oncology, or to let people know about events, like when doctors are speaking to the community, and where they can attend these events.

“We also post videos on our site on a regular basis — we have a YouTube channel that is connected to our Facebook channel that allows patients and families to find out a little bit more about particular subject matter. I think we have approximately 75 videos online on YouTube.”

“We have a Facebook page for marketing so we put some of the events that we do, and we can communicate with people that way,” said Susan Becker, chief operating officer of the Providence Medical Group. “We are not talking about putting clinical information on, but we are able to tell them that this physician will be at this event and other information such as that.”

Premier Health Partners provides electronic newsletters to patients of the 48 practices associated with PHP.

“The newsletter was specifically set up so that the practices could communicate to their patients about changes or if there is a topic or seasonal information that is important for them or relevant for them to help their family be healthy,” said Susan Wollebeck, marketing manager for PHP.

She said that each office is allowed to select from a list of features for the newsletter.

“Then we do custom work for them as well if there are new things going on in their office. In some cases we might have a practice that has added a new doctor, so we bio that doctor and let patients know who the new staff is.”

Wollebeck said 18 of their practices went live with YouTube last year.

“The big one we are finding, especially in the family care practices, is the introductory video where the doctor actually does a video explaining about their practice, what their practice is all about and how it works if you come to them.”

Wollebeck added that they have a very strict policy of not spamming patients. “Patients have every opportunity to say ‘no, they don’t want to get it.’ We want to make them happy.”