Analyzing Social Media Implementation in Hospitals in the U.S. Midwest Region

The purpose of this research is to explore to what scale hospitals are adopting social media and implementing it in accordance with hospital characteristics. We reviewed hospitals’ social media activities on social networking sites such Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. We studied the 912 hospitals in the Midwest region reported in the 2015 American Hospital Association Annual Survey dataset. We reviewed each hospital’s social-networking page to understand the scale of social media adoption relative to the hospital’s characteristics such as bed count, state, ownership type (control), and specialty (service). We also considered whether the hospital is in a network and whether it is physician-owned. We determined the hospital’s degree of social media usage through data on user activity from each social-networking platform. This data includes likes on Facebook, followers on Twitter and Instagram, and subscribers on YouTube. More than 80% of the hospitals in this study have a presence on at least one social-networking website; however, utilization depends on many factors of the hospital’s characteristics. We have observed that hospitals in Ohio, government-owned hospitals, and children’s specialty hospitals with a higher number of full-time registered nurses have a higher degree of social media utilization.