Improving the Patient Experience - Social Media

Transform patient trust and understanding by sharing credible health info on social media. Learn why it matters to reach patients online and build familiarity.

Hello everyone, I want to talk about using social media in order to reach patients. I first started on Instagram about seven years ago and the reason why is I was sitting in my office seeing patients and I realized that I was saying the same thing every day and I think at some point a lot of us have had that same realization that we see patients and we really give one of a few versions of what we say when we talk about aging or IVF or PCOS and what really got to me was the look of shock that so many people had when we talked about fertility facts and what happens as we get older and what happens to egg quality that successful accomplished people did not have basic facts that they needed in order to make decisions to appropriately grow their families and so that led me to start this Instagram mostly to think maybe I can reach people. None of these people in my mind were my patients so I didn't start my social media to help my patients or to enhance my patients experience this journey.

I just thought maybe I can help somebody learn a little bit more about their body but the reality is being on social media has completely transformed the patients that I see and how I practice medicine and the first thing we have to realize is that we are not the majority of the people who are providing health information online. Most of those people are not people who are attending ASRM, learning about reproductive health, care about evidence-based medicine. These are hormone experts and fertility specialists and some of them may have some line of health training that's alternative and some of them just purely are our patients who went through fertility and now call themselves an IVF expert and even though their experience is very valid and they have a voice in this conversation, it is not always transparent online who somebody is and what their credentials are to be giving health facts.

Okay, but if we don't provide a counter-narrative, all we have is people selling snake oil and our problem is that their argument is very sexy like your birth control pills caused PCOS. That sounds great. It's not my fault I have PCOS, it's the birth control pills fault and then they tell you your doctor didn't tell you any of this and your doctor doesn't care about you and your doctor just wants to make money.

So, not only are we seeing patients be fooled by people who don't have the education and the information to share with them, they don't know they're being fooled. They think these are valid health sources and it is leading to distrust in the medical community and I think we can all agree that we saw that most over COVID, right? A very clear example that this whole the COVID vaccine causes infertility was a great example of how one concept ran wild and had immense distrust in the medical community. So, if we are not providing information online to counter, that is the only voice that our patients hear.

Now, we don't all have to be on there all the time but truly the more of us who are sharing our knowledge and expertise, it is beneficial because our patients are searching online spaces every single time they see us, whether it's before they see us or after they see us. They're either looking us up or they're looking up what we have told them and so if we are not the ones telling them that we are in their corner and that we have health information to share with them, they may believe that other narrative and so being familiar to somebody helps provide trust and that's probably the biggest thing that being online can help you with your own patients because whether we want to admit it or not, that's how medicine works now. That's not how medicine used to work.

In the old days, a doctor would go to everybody's house in town and everybody would trust what their doctor said and nobody would ever think that their doctor was out to get them or make money. So, you had this doctor who'd come into your homes and be a part of your life but now the only way for us to get into somebody's house is through their devices, is through their social media platforms and where they spend time and so in order to do that, you have to start becoming present in the places where our patients are hanging out and that is online. The other thing we need to realize is let's think about the current patient experience.

You're not getting pregnant. Everybody else is. You are now somehow or ending up in our office.

The visit with a reproductive endocrinologist is not like any other doctor's visit up to that point. Most people have never been in a visit where they are being educated on their body, provided statistics, talking about chance of success, hearing this devastating news. Unless you really have gone through something like a cancer diagnosis, you've never been faced with a doctor giving you so much scientific information right in front of you and so often, I think we've all experienced patients go glassy-eyed and we think they're understanding us but then they ask all the questions we just went over with them in their visit to a nurse or to us again later because it is a very overwhelming place and that space is really where social media can really enhance the patient experience.

So if we can number one, gain their trust. Number two, we can utilize where they hang out online to help educate them and we can direct them there and that is where video and audio platforms have really transformed the patient narrative and this is where I challenge people to reimagine what we're doing and so a tangible example of one of these is that I started a podcast back in 2019 and I just started talking about fertility and I just started making some topics of these exact same spiels that I talked about all the time and at the time, there were no long-form video platforms besides YouTube so you couldn't really do video on Instagram and there was no TikTok and so I started this podcast and I started telling patients, hey, I know this is a lot but I have an episode on IVF so we just talked about that today but you can go listen to it and then if you have questions, you can send them to me or we're going to talk about this at your next visit so your PCOS diagnosis, I know that's a lot to take in but go listen to that PCOS episode and then you can ask questions afterward so then instead of getting education from the snake oil salesmen, they're getting it from me. I am then educating my own patients and that is resulting in loyalty, trust and action and so if we look at that year that I started the podcast from quarter two to quarter four, so I'm the same me, I've been out of practice for a long time so I didn't practice medicine any differently.

I had a 20% increase in new patients who just discovered me from the podcast and I had a huge increase in my conversion ratio. Now we can argue about a conversion ratio but if you don't know what it is, is it's a metric to track how many of your new patients do IVF or how many of the new patients you see in a time period end up going on to do IVF and so that's an often tracked metric of how you're performing as a physician and mine increased by over 50%. Over 50%, the exact same me, the exact same way I'm practicing, suddenly I had more patients that were going through IVF in a faster turnaround time and why is that? They already got over their shock earlier, they already heard me talk, they already trusted me, they already had bought in to what I was saying.

I was helping educate them in other ways and so they were more loyal and compliant and moved through treatment faster and that also makes it easier for everybody. It makes it easier for you, you don't have to answer the same questions, though that's in this episode, you can listen to that again and I think sometimes I hear people say, I'm not going to go do a big podcast, that's like too overwhelming and I don't want to do that but the thing is there are some local OBGYN groups in our community who they have started their own little podcast just for their patients. They have 20 episodes, it's not a podcast that's going to be every week for forever but they are the things that they talk about the most common.

Vaginal discharge and pap smears and mammograms and preconception testing and they will refer their patients to these in the same way and their patients love it. So your goal of a podcast doesn't have to be to have 2 million downloads but if you utilize your knowledge and the things you say every day, you could then be a resource for your own patients to hear what you're saying again and that's what I tell my patients when I see them in monitoring and they have a subchorionic hematoma and they get all nervous like oh you know I have an episode on this that you know you can listen to and it's going to reinforce the things I told you here but if you need more reassurance you can go listen to that. The other thing now is that video platforms have caught up so you don't have to have a podcast at all.

You can do this exact same thing on Instagram or on TikTok. You can make short form videos where you can make a series of them and tag them together and Laura Shaheen who's over here has a fabulous YouTube video on embryo transfer where she even shows her patients what the embryo transfer suite looks like like what to expect and this is what it looks like and don't you think that makes her patients feel more comfortable when they walk in the door and they ask probably less questions of her staff because they know what's coming so you're educating your own patients. You're also helping you.

You're providing them a service but you're also lessening the burden on you and on your staff. When it comes to familiarity, another real life example is that we started Fora Fertility about two years ago and my amazing partner sitting in the front row being supported, Dr. Amanda Skillern, hates social media with a passion. Like not her thing.

She's like Nat, that is your thing. That is not my thing. I'm not going to do it.

Not going to touch it. You run all the Fora stuff and I said well it's pretty dumb to have just like two accounts that I run and we don't need the Natalie Crawford account number two so we came up with this compromise that one day a week and it's Friday, Amanda would contribute to the account and the agreement was that whatever she wants to post, I will post. Okay and I don't edit it.

It just goes online and this is not educational content. She is not talking about AMH or IVF. This is like entertainment for the most part and if you've ever seen Fora Fertility Friday, that is literally what it is but I'll tell you this.

Our patients love it and patients who feel they know me from social media who maybe before we started Fora would sometimes just not trust the new physician who walked in the room because we're a partner practice and we take care of each other's patients. They see her when she walks in and they're like Dr. Skillern, oh I love what you posted and they have immediate rapport with my partner because of our Instagram account and they trust what she says which they should anyway of course but it makes it all that much easier because she is familiar to them. They trust her and if you want to have, I think I could talk forever about trying to convince you to be on social media if those real life examples haven't but very often people want to know well okay where do I start or how do I have success? What are the tips? If I'm going to do it, what do I need to do? The first thing I always say is that your online professional persona should be your own and you should automatically go and buy your web domain nataliecrawfordmd.com, drlaurashaheen.com because if you do not own it, somebody else will.

They will direct it to their practice which might compete against yours and then you're not utilizing your biggest tool to helping your own searchability which is a domain in your name. That probably costs you less than ten dollars and no matter what you do in this field, that's very valuable online real estate. I don't care if you just direct it right to your practice for now.

You can just literally go into name cheap and redirect it to whatever your practice is in your about me page and that's fine but you could eventually build it out and I know everybody here has enough to talk about who they are and what they do and why they do this job to make that worthwhile. The second thing is you should lean in to one of the free and easy platforms. Instagram or TikTok.

Those are going to be your highest reaching platforms to patients. They're going to be the ones that they are on the most and the easiest to get started. They have video editing tools inside so you don't have to get fancy software.

You don't have to follow funny trends. You can literally do it inside and one of the things I hear people say all the time is, I don't want to do TikTok. I don't want to dance.

I don't want to do any of that. I don't have time to learn how to do this. Okay, I don't have a lot of time either.

I will tell you that my most successful TikToks are where I turn the camera on myself and I just share a medical fact and I just talk to the camera and I put closed caption on and I post it to the world and Instagram has made it so easy for us now because they're also rewarding video content. So I just take my TikTok and I just put it on Instagram and I do no extra work and then that same video that took me a couple of minutes to make reaches so many more people because Instagram is really leaning into it. There's a power in using your face and your voice to educate people and it is also going to allow patients to feel like they know you and they trust you and they know how you communicate and they feel like you're going to be a good fit for them and so you can break down all of this stuff that we talk about all the time into these little short digestible content and you don't have to look perfect.

It can be very real at the end of a day in scrubs in your office take a 15 to 30 second video and just get it out there. The other thing that I don't see people do enough is utilize if they're going to be on social media their bio enough. They just kind of like let it be blank or they don't really utilize that space.

If you're trying to reach patients you might think I don't really care about reaching them. Maybe I don't care about growing my practice that way. I don't need to listen to what Griffin said about marketing.

That doesn't matter to me. I would argue as he says your patients and aren't my patients are getting younger than me every single day and if I don't go to where they communicate I'm going to be out of touch if I just rely on my referrals to send me patients because eventually I've got to recruit new people. So I think social media has a lot of power to bring patients in your door and I'll tell you almost every patient I see now finds me through a social media site whether it is Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, the podcast.

That is how they are getting in my door. But the other thing that social media is doing for you is it's allowing your patients to find you and I think that's the piece of the puzzle that so often we neglect. You can talk about online who you are, what your qualifications are, and what you're doing.

So, make your bio like your tiniest little resume. Make it pretty, make it concise. Mine says Natalie Crawford, MD, fertility doctor, board-certified OBGYN and RAI, co-founder of Fora Fertility.

So I'm easily describing like who I am and where you can find me. I also don't see people utilize the free options on these platforms. So one of the faults of Instagram is the bio is only tiny so you can't put tons of things in there but you can utilize pronouns.

If you just have pronouns, suddenly the LGBTQ community knows you're going to be receptive to seeing them as patients. Easy way that doesn't take any character count. You can also use a business.

So my Instagram is a business and it says fertility doctor. So I don't have to type that in. You can use a location.

So mine says Austin, Texas and you can use a link in your bio which you should do whether it's to your practice page or to yours. So your bio is going to be what's going to make somebody stay or somebody leave. The other thing is that people love faces.

So if you're going to be there, I know it is so hard to put your face out there and nobody loves recording videos and it is awkward. I will tell you I said I'm never dancing on social media and this one's had me twirling a baton and a tutu. So there's sometimes things that we do to support the people we love but if you love this job and you love your patients and no matter what role you have, whether you're a nurse or a pharmacist or a doctor, you can help them get through this experience by turning your camera around and just talking to it.

Nothing has to be fancy. It just has to be real and using the knowledge you have because everybody in this room is an expert at something and there is somebody out there telling our patients the exact opposite and that's the thing that we need to really remember the most. We view social media as what can it do for me but if we flip the lens and we say how can it help my patient, I think there's a lot of growth opportunity that we can have in the space.

So thank you guys so much.