The Military Health System is increasingly relying on social media to spread its message to patients, for at least two very good reasons.
One is that 98 percent of current active duty U.S. military personnel are from post-baby boom generations. These are people that have grown up on the Internet and spend much of their time on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
And, since more and more people rely on the Internet for information, including health information, MHS has an interest in spreading information that is reliable.
"The Web is where people are going for information and what they see becomes truth," said Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, director of MHS strategic communications at January's MHS annual conference in Washington. "The good thing about the Internet is that there is an awful lot of information to be found there. The bad thing about it is that it doesn't have the label "˜truth' on it."
Disseminating information through social media allows message content to controlled centrally, while communications professionals reformat it for broadcast through different channels.
The MHS Blog is one of the oldest of the social media tools used by the organization. "The Military Health System is a complex system of systems and a lot of people don't know how to access it properly," said Kilpatrick.
"The people who use the system"service members and their families, retirees and their families"have difficulty understanding the whole system let alone the part they are trying to use. Having people tell their personal stories on the blog helps beneficiaries to understand the part of the system that is of interest to them."
The MHS Blog is one of the sites accessible through the MHS Social Media Hub, together with about four dozen other sites maintained by MHS or other Department of Defense units. The hub provides links to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube sites, as well as to lesser known social media outlets such as Delicious, Diigo, and TroopTube.
Absent from the hub is a link to the MHS-operated channel on ICYou.com, a site devoted to video presentations on health-related topics. MHS has posted around 20 videos on that site.
Facebook is playing an increasingly important role in the military health community. Although the MHS Facebook page was slow to develop a fan following, Kilpatrick started on online campaign which succeeded in quickly growing the fan base to over 1,000, and eventually to 1,500.
Some health-related social media applications are local in scope. At the Naval Air Station Whiting Field in Florida, Capt. Jeff Plummer, a medical officer, noticed that pilots spent much of their downtime on Facebook. So he started a Facebook page for the Branch Health Clinic at Whiting in the hopes of raising awareness among users of health issues and encouraging them to adopt healthful lifestyles.
Items on the clinic Facebook wall range from information on H1N1 vaccinations to food recalls to exercise programs. Future plans for the site include posting health and medical information of specific interest to aviators.
Kilpatrick sees Twitter as another potentially useful tool for the Military Health System to keep in touch with patients.
"We think Twitter might be used to remind diabetic patients to check their blood sugar," he said. "These are all tools we can use to repurpose social sites for medical care."
