Welcome back, everyone, for the afternoon program. This is going to be an exciting afternoon with multiple talks that are geared towards the changing environment in our medical profession and how to grapple with the changes that are happening. The first talk, I won't take too much time introducing him because he will be available for us during the Q&A process, is Austin Chang's talk on social media and marketing your GI practice. I don't think he needs much of an introduction, but as I said, I will do so before the Q&A session when he's live. This is a prerecorded talk on social media and marketing in your GI practice. Hi. My name is Austin Chang. I'm the chief medical officer at Medtronic GI, and I'm also an advanced and bariatric endoscopist at Jefferson Health in Philadelphia, where I also serve as the chief medical social media officer, and I'm also the founding president of the Association for Health Care Social Media. Today, I'm going to be speaking to you about social media and marketing your GI practice. In terms of relevant disclosures, I'm on the YouTube Health Advisory Board. I'm going to begin by talking about how we should be thinking about social media and health care. Then, I'll speak about selecting the optimal platform for your needs. I'll then get into my journey and motivation and describe how I got to where I am today before finishing on a quick beginner's guide and some pitfalls that we should all be aware of when we're talking about how to use social media in health care. How do you think about social media? Do you think of it as a tool to stay connected with people you already know, like your friends and family? To be connected with the lives of celebrities or other public figures, like politicians? Or do you use it as a tool to obtain information with regards to health or other current events? The fact of the matter is, celebrities, influencers, and other entrepreneurs have been using social media to build their businesses, and sometimes to the extent that they've become billion dollar empires. Federal agencies and medical journals and other organizations and societies have also been using social media to get the message out there to their constituents, sometimes to the entire population. What's to say that physicians and other health professionals can't use social media to also reach a wider audience and get a specific health message out there, whether it's to educate or promote their own practice? So if we take a look at the health care social media ecosystem, all the major GI societies that we're familiar with and major GI journals are present on social media, and that includes the ASGE and GIE, which have accounts on multiple different social media platforms. Thought leaders and our colleagues are also active on social media, and they're more accessible than ever, so you can actually have a conversation and potentially forge some great collaborations through social media. And lastly, our patients are on social media. They're often sharing their own personal stories, their journeys, their struggles, their concerns, and they may even be sharing their experiences with you as their physician. Global social media use has only increased year after year, now exceeding four billion users in 2021. Chances are you are a social media user yourself, and there's no sign that social media is going away anytime soon. So it's best that we familiarize ourselves with the different social media platforms and what opportunities there may be. If I can direct your eyes to the green clock at the center of the screen, it shows that on average, people spend two hours and 25 minutes a day on social media. That's two hours and 25 minutes being exposed to all kinds of information on social media, some of which may be health-related. It may also be an opportunity for us to get certain health messages across or promotional messages about your practice to people of interest. You may assume that a lot of people use social media for personal use, but surveys show that across all age groups, there are plenty of people using social media for work purposes. In 2021, the number one reason why people use social media isn't to share content with their friends and family, but it's actually to stay up to date with news and current events. And over the past two years, the biggest news story has been the COVID-19 pandemic. And clearly, if there are people obtaining their health information from social media, that could ultimately drive public opinion and public health outcomes. Now this is a key slide. Many people ask me, what is the best social media platform for me to be on? And I think there's several elements that play into this. The first thing to understand is what all these social media platforms share in common, and that is to keep the user on their app for as long as possible. And each of them achieves this through different ways. Some are more text-based, some are more image-sharing based, others are more video-sharing based. And that, in turn, may or may not align with your strengths as a content creator. So if you're not comfortable with being on camera or filming or editing videos, YouTube may not be as attractive an option as, say, Twitter, which is more text-based. And each of these platforms has also developed a culture of its own and attracted different audiences. Twitter, for instance, is where a lot of the academic discussion is happening. And there are many physicians and trainees and patients, to a lesser extent. But if we're looking at YouTube or TikTok, those are much more public-facing social media platforms, and there are more patients that are engaging on those platforms. Part of this is how the social media platforms are built. So YouTube, for instance, houses billions of videos, but it's also the second largest search engine after Google. And so patients will actually search for information on YouTube just as they would on Google. TikTok, on the other hand, has an interface that is also very public-facing. If we take Twitter or Instagram, where the content that you put out is mainly aimed at those who already follow you, TikTok, as long as you're creating content that is engaging, funny, informative, interesting, it could potentially go viral and reach millions of people who aren't following you. And so the potential to reach a wider audience on TikTok, I'd say, is greater than on Instagram or Twitter. Now let's take a look at who's using these social media platforms. So globally, Facebook is the largest social media platform out there, but in the United States, YouTube is actually more popular. On the right-hand side of this slide, we can see that different age groups also have adopted the social media platforms in different proportions. So if we look at Snapchat, for instance, there's very few people who are age 65 or older on Snapchat, but 65% of people between 18 and 29 are on Snapchat. The distribution varies by platform, so you can also check that out on this slide here, but this may actually help you if you're looking to direct your health messaging at a certain group to pick your platform carefully. In addition to age, there are other demographic characteristics such as socioeconomic status, education, ethnicity, gender, that differ by social media platform as well. So again, if you are looking to target your messaging to a certain group, you may want to pick one platform over another. Now I want to discuss my journey a little bit because people often ask me why I got into social media in the first place. Aside from being a big social media fanatic for my entire life, pretty much, one of the things that I noticed was that patients were coming into the hospital often because of wrong or inaccurate information that they were hearing through the media or social media. And this slide basically is a quick snapshot of a lot of the different health claims that are totally not evidence-based that patients may actually be listening to or substituting for their actual medical recommendations from you as their physician. So as a result, what I discovered was erroneous information is easily perpetuated on social media. On the previous slide, there were a lot of very appealing health claims about how a fruit or vegetable could cure a certain disease. And while that might sound very silly, patients often are seeking solutions and will take that sort of advice and substitute it for their care and potentially delay their care and show up to your office with a more serious condition. So in my mind, clinicians and other thought leaders especially need to be on social media to be heard or risk having our narrative told by others. However, getting clinicians on social media isn't easy. Simply telling everybody to get on social media is often not enough. So clinicians need incentives to participate in public dialogue to impact public health. What those incentives are, a bit hard to define. I think in the future, we'll see more evolution in this space. But within academia, for instance, some institutions have actually adopted social media or incorporated it into the tenure and promotion structure to help clinicians spend a little more time on social media and not just on publications or other kind of traditional incentives. So yes, I always felt that there was a disconnect with this expectation that we were supposed to exit medical training and automatically be able to communicate with our communities and impact their health. But we're not given any of the resources to do that. Information in the digital age even today isn't taught enough in medical school. We're not taught marketing, PR, or communications, and we can't effectively use the tools that are out there to communicate with patients when, in fact, many of them are using social media to obtain their health information. And so part of my goal within GI and also outside of the GI community has been to not only encourage clinicians to use social media, but also develop guidance on how to use it not only effectively to reach a wider audience, but also to do it responsibly to prevent further erosion of trust in healthcare. Because we all know that at the moment, trust in healthcare and health professionals is at an all-time low. So how my journey unfolded was that I had this initial interest in social media and a desire to learn how medical information reaches patients. I spent some time at ABC News learning how the medical news was vetted. And then I started developing a social media platform and presence of my own professionally. I tried doing this for my division where I trained and ran into some barriers. So I tried to be creative and started doing social media research as an academic pursuit. I also obtained my master's in public health and started assisting all of the GI societies that we're familiar with. I then took on the role of chief medical social media officer at Jefferson and founded the Association for Healthcare Social Media where we now partner with many of the social media platforms directly to educate health professionals on how to use their platforms in the most optimal way. So it drove me initially with disseminating accurate health information to where patients are and also participating in this movement against health misinformation. And through that, I've also found community and networked both within and outside the GI communities. And I've also been able to highlight less visible areas in my specialty such as bariatric endoscopy, where patients are often looking for elective procedures but they don't know what they don't know. And so through my platform, being able to highlight these options for patients has translated to patients actually coming to my practice as well as colleagues of mine I've referred to all across the country. I've also been able to use my social media platform for social justice and advocacy efforts. And I've also been able to showcase a more personal side and humanize the profession because I think this is very important, at least for me, to show that I have the same struggles and questions and concerns that my patients have because that to me is a way to help combat this distrust in our profession. And moving forward, I'd like to explore more how to reshape medicine for the 21st century using social media actively as a tool to impact health outcomes. So this is another key slide. It's basically my beginner's guide to social media success and that is really to adopt that communications and PR mindset that we're not taught in medical school. It does take a leap of faith. Every time I use a new social media platform, it's a little bit nerve-wracking and I'm not used to it and there's a learning curve that I have to overcome. I also try to brand myself in a different way that's consistent across all the different platforms using the same name, for instance, and sometimes using the same sort of aesthetic or color scheme, but also needing to conform to what the different platforms' cultures are. Some are more, again, more patient-facing, whereas others are more professional-facing, like LinkedIn. Consistent engagement is very important because having a platform that lays dormant is not going to do anyone any good and, in fact, may actually reflect poorly on your practice or your own engagement. Staying true to your voice is also very important because if you are interested in promoting a specific area within gastroenterology, having that niche will actually ultimately attract your audience. They will come to you because they will see you as the voice behind this specific niche. Finding a role model may be also very helpful. There are plenty of physicians nowadays on the various platforms who you may want to emulate, and there are opportunities out there to employ professional help, like social media marketing agencies, etc., to help manage this for you. Personally, I do all this on my own. I've become very efficient at it. I also don't necessarily want other people meddling with my voice online because I do have a very specific way of going about it. However, it's not something that I've completely ruled out, and I know many of my colleagues outside of GI as well have employed professional help to help them execute this. And so through all my efforts, I've been able to cultivate a following of over half a million followers or subscribers on various different platforms with over 130 million views. And this screenshot really is just to show you that I have a different aesthetic for each platform that fits with the culture of that platform. I try to maximize all the different functionalities of those platforms and really be a part of the culture that matches what viewers on those platforms expect to see. I want to spend the last few moments talking about the risks of social media use because ultimately I think we need to use social media responsibly to not erode trust in healthcare. The number one thing is to preserve patient privacy and also avoid individualized medical advice. So when patients or people on the internet are trying to solicit medical advice, it is often with incomplete information and also not through official channels, obviously, because it's over the internet and not through the electronic health record. So it is best to avoid individualized medical advice. There are a host of other risks to social media use, including the time commitment it takes to devote to this, peer comparisons and the psychological consequences of being on social media, privacy and personal safety. If you are posting where you are at certain hours of day, patients or other people may be able to track you down, imposters and scammers, cyber bullying. These are things that many of us have faced and learned the hard way because we speak about sensitive health issues or sensitive health topics such as vaccines or reproductive health, et cetera, in different fields. And so these are things to be aware of if you're going to actively engage on social media. Of course, the number one thing is that depending on your employer, your social media activity must abide with your employer's social media policy. So no matter where you are, what you try to do, please review your institutional social media policy first. A couple of take home points, social media can be leveraged for its tremendous reach. The content is public though, which therefore comes with advantages of reaching that wide audience, but also disadvantages that you need to really watch what you say and make sure that you're not violating HIPAA or other institutional policies set forth by your employer. Social media for practice building requires a shift in mindset. We're not taught those marketing and communication skills. So put yourself in the shoes of a marketer and go at it that way. Again, beware of pitfalls. Make sure that you're remaining professional on these social media platforms. And of course, more incentives and guidance are necessary. I'll go into that in the next slide. For more guidance, please consider joining the Association for Healthcare Social Media, of which I am the founding president. Again, we partner with the social media platforms directly to provide education on how to use these social media platforms best for health professionals. We've also had our first annual meeting last year with lecture series and experts providing insight on their experiences as well as an abstract submission process. We've also collaborated with Cochrane Collaborations to provide funding for health social media research. There are also GI social media overviews that have been published, one of which is by yours truly in Nature Reviews Gastroenterology and Hepatology, as well as within the ASGE journals as well in GIE and other journals of other GI societies like the Red Journal. Now, many of the societies have also hosted various social media offerings and courses, so keep an eye out for those as well. And for those of you who are on social media like myself, I found this New Yorker cartoon to describe my entire existence. Bio exits the gallbladder, passes through the cystic duct, gets released into the intestines, and ultimately winds up on the internet. So there's no better cartoon to describe me. Thank you so much for your attention. I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have. If you'd like to ask me any questions in private, please feel free to direct message me or message me privately on any of the social media platforms listed. My handle is AustinChengMD across all platforms, including LinkedIn and Facebook as well, which are not listed here. But once again, thank you so much, and I look forward to speaking with you.

social media

marketing

GI practices

physicians

health-related information

social media platforms