With all of the information available surrounding health and health care, how do you know what’s accurate and what’s not? The infamous “Dr. Google” leads many individuals down a seemingly inescapable rabbit hole. It’s important to know how to seek out reliable sources, so you don’t panic when panic is undeserved.
Kathy Wilets, Senior Director of Media Relations and Content Marketing, and Paul Gadd, Director of Internal Communications, both from the University of Utah Health, share helpful insights for anyone who is wrestling with the over-abundance of information at our fingertips.
Truth: Straight from Physicians’ Mouths
Per Wilets, University of Utah Health’s approach to its owned content platforms is to help patients and the general public make better health care decisions and ultimately live a healthier life.
“The best way we can do that is to be our own source of truth. We have incredible media partners, but about 15 years ago we started working on our own platforms. At the same time, I think many in health care were starting to become active on social media channels, and we realized we could communicate directly to our audiences,” she states. “Who better than us to share our own information? Our content is vetted by our own health care professionals. We're using them as our experts.”
This became especially critical during the COVID-19 pandemic. In-person meetings became less of a priority, replaced by live streaming.
“We had our chief medical officer, our leaders, our chief epidemiologists in front of a camera every single morning at 7:30 AM, conveying the most important and latest information our teams needed to know about,” explains Gadd. “In addition, at the end of every single day, we had the CEO of our entire health system put out an email capturing the three most important things they needed to know about. We recognized the need to establish channels our employees could go to and trust for the latest, most accurate information.”
Why Leadership Buy-In Is Essential
A key component of consistent, streamlined communication and messaging relies on leadership buy-in. Not just from a budgetary standpoint, but from a time investment perspective—from everyone contributing to the effort.
“You think about the daily newscast our team was doing that required a camera and a little bit of script writing, somebody to record the message, and then putting it on the internet. These are very easy things to do, but they do require a bit of effort and a bit of time,” shares Gadd. “That commitment from leaders to convey information has not gone away. That's what I think is absolutely key.”
An Opportunity for Positive Social Media Sharing
Social media can be a good source of information, but as many know, also a source of misinformation. Wilets notes that the University of Utah Health faculty did an amazing job of being active on social media platforms and monitoring any sources that didn’t have the full story.
“If they noticed something that was inaccurate, they would very respectfully, very gently, course correct through social media platforms to say, ‘Hey, that's an interesting take. Here's what the science says about this topic.’ We're really lucky in that we have people committed to the goals of accurate information and who are active on social media and not afraid to put themselves out there.”
Wilets and Gadd will be presenting at SHSMD 2023 on this very topic. To learn more about the annual conference in Chicago, September 10-12, visit the SHSMD website.