NFMGMA March 2014 Educational Session – The Nuts and Bolts of Social Media for Your Medical Practice: How to Determine What to Do, When to Do It and How to Measure the Results

Mary Pat Whaley – Manage My Practice 

by Richard Stokes 

Medical-Social-MediaFacebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and LinkedIn to name a few – how many of these are you familiar with and how many are a part of your daily personal or business life?

Social media is arguably the fastest growing trend on the planet and, to put that into perspective, here’s a figure for you to chew on – The World’s population is estimated at approximately 7 billion people and Facebook has an estimated 1.3 billion active monthly Facebook users.  That’s nearly 20% of the world’s population that is active on Facebook every month.

So where are you with incorporating this medium into your medical practice?  Well, if you’re just not sure then you’re in luck.  At March’s NFMGMA meeting we’re going to be hearing from Mary Pat Whaley, Co-Founder and President of Manage My Practice.

Mary Pat has served at just about every level you can think of in the medical community from Practice Administrator, to Project Manager to Chief Operating Officer.  As a medical practice management consultant she’s a tremendous resource for our group and we’re excited that she’s going to be with us and talking to us about the ‘Nuts and Bolts of Social Media for Medical Practices’.

In the area of social media she is a member of the Advisory Board to the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media and is currently creating three Social Media Residency curriculum courses.  She also has 90,400 followers on LinkedIn so I’d say we’re going to get some real value at this meeting.

Mary Pat says that social media is so important for medical practices today because practices have changed so significantly in the past 5 years.  Social media is one of the positive changes that gives the potential to attract and retain patients, thus allowing them to compete more effectively in their respective market.

Some of topics she will be covering and helping us to understand better are:

  • The top social media platforms – Blogs, Facebook, YouTube, and Google+, etc.
  • What each platform has to offer the medical practice.
  • An introduction to CRM (Customer Relationship Management) to get everyone thinking about not just the patients you have now, but your future patients.

As with most things, you’re not going to be able to implement a full-blown social media program when you leave, but Mary Pat does want each attendee to have the tools to go back to their practice and have a discussion about using social media. See if you can answer the following questions:

  • If you are currently using social media, are you measuring the results and are the results acceptable?
  • If you are not currently using social media, why might you consider it and what is the potential ROI?
  • What types of social media are appropriate for your practice goals and what is the cost associated with each?
  • What is your social media action plan for 2014?

If you can’t then you’re not going to want to miss out on this month’s meeting.  If you haven’t registered yet, stop what you’re doing and do it right now.  Feel free to share this with your peers and colleagues and invite them to attend as well.  North Fulton MGMA

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Richard Stokes: As the Director of Sales for Network 1, Richard identifies “future” clients that can benefit from the support of an experienced, outsourced IT team. He helps clients and prospects find technology solutions they need to achieve better productivity and efficiency so they can focus on making money and growing their businesses.

Network 1 designs, builds and supports the IT you need to run your business more securely, productively and successfully. Whether you want to outsource all of your IT needs to a reliable, responsive, service-oriented company, or need to supplement the work of your internal IT staff, we will carefully evaluate where you are now, discuss where you want to go and implement and support a plan to get you there with as little interruption as possible.

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