Hospitals have found Twitter. Should we be afraid?

Slowly, and somewhat surprisingly, health care is atwitter.

Despite being notoriously privacy-conscious, a trickle of health-care systems are venturing with new-media vigor onto Facebook, Twitter and other social media applications.

For the moment, it’s a pretty mundane excursion. Medical centers are using cyberspace’s latest frontier to promote their press releases – and largely only other health-care workers are clicking through.

But the excitement among Health 2.0 advocates is more about the potential than the first attempts. Social media is based on the idea of interacting with others online. So, is America – or American health care, for that matter – ready for the next step: when doctors and patients friend each other, tweet together and subscribe to each other’s FriendFeeds?

“I believe the vast majority of information consumed through the Web is going to be done through social networking,” said Edward Bennett, director of Web strategy for University of Maryland Medical Center. “Right now, people are looking through search engines. In five years, the typical activity will be to go into a social network.”

Bennett oversees Hospital Group, a collection of more than 50 health-care organizations using Twitter, the online tool adored by Web devotees that lets users swap messages no longer than 140 characters long. Hospital Group includes the likes of Cleveland Clinic Center for Continuing Education, Sisters of Charity Health System and Ohio State University Medical Center.

“The message is the same. The way we’re communicating with the public is different,” said Luke Russell, program manager the OSU medical center’s Communication and Marketing Department.

Russell typically sends out “tweets” — Twitter slang for messages — about new OSU health research, for example: “Blueberries May Inhibit Growth Of Blood-Vessel Tumor http: //twurl.nl/wzyy7s.”

Roughly 275 people follow the messages on the medical center’s Twitter page. Anywhere from eight to 30 people click through to the center’s Web site, Russell said.

“We’re walking into it – not rushing into it,” said David Crawford, senior director for media relations Ohio State’s Medical Center.

A few hospitals are more aggressive. Sutter Health launched a broad social media campaign to accompany the construction of a new hospital in Castro Valley, Calif. It includes a presence on Twitter and other social networking sites Facebook (including a group), LinkedIn, FriendFeed and YouTube, which offers presentations of construction plans. Sutter also launched a blog with authors who include hospital executives and architects.

“I knew that until the bulldozers show up on campus, there will not enough interest to come into the hospital and learn about the project,” said Cassandra Phelps, project communications director at Sutter Medical Center Castro Valley. “This is a conversation we have to start.”

Having these conversations is extremely labor-intensive. Sutter has three people working on the project, though no one on a full-time basis and most of them are contractors working with the hospital. And at least for now, there’s not much payoff. Only a couple of seven YouTube videos have been watched more than 100 times, and the Facebook group has about 20 members.

Yet some of the conversations Phelps sees in the networks move from construction to health care. When the hospital opens in 2013, she expects these social networks will serve as ways to engage patients and doctors, and to explain services and what to expect at the facility.

That’s the transition that vexes health-care Web strategists. Health-care officials would be concerned about privacy violations. And doctors could fret about whether the government would reimburse them for such conversations.

The issue sparked a lively discussion at Clinical Cases, one of the more popular blogs covering health care and technology.

“Do you really want [your hospital] following your every comment on Twitter?” Bennett wrote. “I know I don’t. If we don’t recognize and respect boundaries, then we will be rejected by the patients we want to serve.”

But another person wondered if it would be poor customer service to ignore patients on social networks, or to not answer bloggers or questions on sites like Yahoo! Answers.

Clinical Cases author Dr. Ves Dimov said such interaction would help physicians better treat their patients.

“A recent study showed that when radiologists matched X-rays/MRI/CT scans to patient photos, they performed better,” Dimov wrote. “Twitter may be a way for the hospitals to know their patients better, and the patients may actually appreciate this.”