SART Fertility Experts - Safe Surfing: The Pros and Perils of Social Media

Dr. Kenan Omurtag, MD joins host Dr. Mark Trolice to discuss the use of social media in the field of infertility. Dr. Omurtag is Associate Professor of Reproductive Endocrinology and infertility at the Washington University St. Louis School of Medicine. Today’s podcast explores the way infertility practices use social media to educate and market to patients. Patients will also learn how best to gain information about a medical practice and infertility while online.

The information and opinions expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect those of ASRM and SART. These podcasts are provided as a source of general information and are not a substitute for consultation with a physician. Welcome to SART Fertility Experts, a podcast that brings you discussions on important topics for people trying to build a family.

Our experts are members of SART, the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, an organization dedicated to ensuring you receive quality fertility care. Hi everyone, and welcome to the SART Patient Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Mark Trolice, and today we're going to be speaking about the pros and cons of physician influencers with a good friend, Dr. Kenan Omurtag, who is the associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

He did his training at Emory, where he did his residency in obstetrics and gynecology, and then a fellowship in Washington University. He is also the chairman of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine Technology Committee, and he is very, very well-versed in the area of social media. We were just collaborators on a paper that was published in Fertility Dialogues about social media and physicians, so I think this is a good resource for you all to know what type of physician you can be following on the different platforms of social media, and also what you can be looking for in the type of information that you want to gain.

So welcome, Kenan, to the SART Patient Podcast. Thanks, Mark. It's good to be here.

When did you start really getting into social media? So actually, when I was a fellow in 2010, the Social Network had just come out the movie about Mark Zuckerberg, and we kind of were sitting around the fellow office, and we're like, you know what, we should do a study looking at how fertility clinics are using social media. So we did a descriptive study, just basically we looked at all SART member clinics, went to their websites, and just kind of took inventory of what they were doing, and about a third of the clinics at the time had, this is 2011, had a social media presence. Largely a Facebook page is what that translated to.

Some had YouTube content. So that's how it got started. Yeah, and so bring us to today.

What is your level of engagement on social media? What is your go-to platforms, and what kind of information, before we get into what patients want to see, what kind of information do you think is valuable to be posted on each of the platforms? So that's a good question. So we kind of started, I kind of started this as more a kind of interest story in how people were using social media, specifically how physicians, and more interestingly clinics, were using the technology to reach out to patients. And what we found, and what has appeared to develop over the, you know, 2010 to 2014-15, was that the clinics were using the technology to advertise, promote things.

Hey, we got a new clinic here. Hey, we want to educate on PCOS, or whatever the topic would be. There would be some educational content, but most of it was one-way communication with little engagement coming from just the clinics, just throwing information out into the ether.

At the time, there did not appear to be a lot of traction on Instagram. It was still kind of a newer technology. Twitter was too fast for me, so I never really landed there.

And then after the 2016 election, I kind of got, and I think we all as a society kind of in this, in this country at least, got burnt out on Facebook and started leaving that platform. And what I learned in doing a subsequent study is that most of our patients are using Instagram. So I migrated to Instagram, and then when I migrated to Instagram, I kind of, this is like 2016, now 2017, I was like, there's a ton of people on here talking about healthcare information, and a lot of these people I know.

So then I, that's when I actually got active in using the platforms to communicate with patients. So let's, let's bring it down to real elementary. So, so the website is really your business card, right? I mean, that's really what's giving patients familiarity, and it's still, I think, fluid.

They're still trying to increase ways to make the website more appealing. Videos are on the website about the practice and so on and so forth. So I guess the website is, is vital for patients to become somewhat familiar with what we can expect.

I think a website needs to be a corollary to what the practice is. So what they can expect from the website from their first visit, essentially. So I think the website, I'm gonna say something provocative.

I mean, I think the website might be becoming extinct as far as a tool to reach out to patients. Because what we're learning, especially when we look at our social media metrics, most people are accessing our metric, our social media accounts on their mobile phone. And then they're also looking at our website on their mobile phone.

Well, they have to be mobile ready. They have to be mobile ready. And our website is mobile ready.

But I think a lot of people are consuming healthcare content on social media platforms, specifically Instagram, which appears to be where a lot of reproductive age women are getting healthcare information. And I think they're looking for, they're seeing physicians either in their markets or outside their markets that look like they could be someone they would feel comfortable seeing or are demonstrating knowledge or sharing knowledge on the platform that make them feel like, this is what I'm looking for. I didn't have to go looking for it.

It just popped up on my... Well, I still think... So I think the website is still important, but I think the role of it is evolving. Absolutely. But I think it needs to continue to evolve because it really is the first impression that a patient can get of the practice in its entirety.

True. And if you can really capture the essence of the practice from the website, then that can reduce the anxiety and increase the familiarity of the patient when they come to the practice because you got your meet the staff, about the staff, pictures of the office, in one place, as well as articles and updates about the practice. But as the go-to for everything, clearly that's passed.

Okay. So we got the website and where that is, but where do you think Facebook is today? What should patients be expecting if they follow a practice on Facebook or a physician on Facebook? And what kind of things should a physician be putting out and using Facebook to provide patients? So I think Facebook, again, the user that is on Facebook today is probably a little bit different than it was four years ago because I think a lot of people have left Facebook and have joined like whether they're more active on Instagram or some people have quit social media altogether. But for those people that are still on Facebook, I think there's still value for physicians to be posting their content there because a lot of people still use that medium as a primary social media tool.

I think Facebook is a great place for sharing news articles and links, but you got to comment on those news articles and links. It's probably not very helpful to engage patients if you're just saying, here I am, Dr. Omurtag, and I'm sharing this news article about, you know, obesity and fertility, and I have nothing to say, but here's the article. So I think physicians should be sharing their perspectives, their takes, if you will, on the article that is being shared because sharing articles on other platforms is a little more difficult.

And I think that's what physicians should be doing on Facebook. Such an excellent point. And for the listeners, I think what would be valuable for you is to follow someone that does comment to say, you know, the media are going to make a sensationalization about an article.

IVF and birth defects, IVF and low pregnancy rate from exposure from X. And so when we put it out there, you want to basically say, look, I understand this article can be alarming. Here's my take on this. Good, bad, or indifferent.

But I think we have to comment on that, and they're looking for that. So Facebook is still an important part of a physician's social media and the ability for patients to be able to gain good information from physicians? Yeah, I think Facebook is still valuable. I mean, it's still, I think Facebook and Instagram are still my top two that I use.

I have the most familiarity with Facebook, again, because I grew up with it. But Instagram is, which is owned by Facebook, is a pretty intuitive tool to pick up. It doesn't take that much energy.

Almost as that Facebook today is the website from the past. Yeah, like I would say, a lot of people, they're going to click first on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter before they're going to click on Chrome to look at, or their browser, to look at news. So when they go to Facebook, when a patient reaches a practice's page, what kind of things should a patient be looking for to say, hey, this is a practice that is going to be empowering me with knowledge.

It's making me feel comfortable with their philosophy. What are the things that you'd be looking for? I mean, there's obviously, patients of physician practices will still just do a lot of advertising about their, what they offer, possibly rates. But what is it that's going to distinguish a patient from all of the different practices? Why would they say this practice has got it? I think you can tell just the, I think practices that, quote, get it, are the ones that use a lot of visual mediums to tell a story and do it well.

And there's the old saying, you know it when you see it. Patients can really tell, this looks good. I can tell that this looks like a good page that has been thoughtful.

Someone is expending some time in developing this. A lot of text is not helpful. So leveraging the visual mediums, whether they're videos or whether they're still pictures, whether they're pictures of the staff, whether they're pictures of, you know, the physicians or the staff in what look like kind of vulnerable moments, whether they're positive or negative, I think is valid.

And sometimes they're staged pictures too, and that's okay. You can make a staged picture promote, or at least not promote, but you know, at least project a very genuine feeling that is complemented by a caption, for example. Video is still king online? I think video is still valuable, but short video is actually the name of the game.

You know, anything more than 15, you know, depending on what metric you look at, 20 minutes is too long. 10 to 15 is good for YouTube. You know, 15 minutes, I was talking to someone the other day, 15 minutes on YouTube is important for advertising reasons, but on Facebook, five minutes or less.

Okay, let's move over to Instagram. I think Instagram is still confusing for some physicians of what to use. I think Twitter is confusing for physicians on how to use it, but Instagram is increasing.

I think your article showed that, and the metrics show that. So what should a practice be looking to put out on Instagram, and what should patients be looking to find on Instagram about a practice? You know, we were talking before the podcast about, I don't know if physicians want to see a patient, I'm sorry, I don't know if patients want to see a physician with a dog or doing outside non-medical social things. There may be a place to show the human side of a physician to get some familiarity and comfort, but what is the real goal of a fertility practice on Instagram? I think the goal is to, I think those, okay, so first of all, I think the goal of those practices is to really provide, it's to leverage the visual cues of Instagram.

So when I thought of, you know, a long time ago, Instagram was like, hey, here's a picture of my food that I'm eating today. Look at this great, there's a joke about social media websites and or social media sites and how they're distilled. And to me, that's why it took me so long to get to Instagram, because I didn't know how to leverage the visual medium.

But I've learned through just following people who do it well and seeing how they do it. And it takes, you know, a couple scroll throughs to figure out how they're doing it, but you pick up pretty quick that actually the pictures of themselves in vulnerable moments, being themselves, are valuable when paired with an appropriate caption that projects a message that you're trying to share and use the visual to complement that message. I see a lot of physicians with selfies, essentially.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or they're taking pictures, or they're, here's me at the office, here's me, you know, here's me in a, you know, the baby picture thing is a whole nother thing, but yeah, there, here's me, it's, here's me in this setting, here's me in that setting, here's me doing this, here's me doing that. Is that what patients want to be seeing? I think patients want to see a little, I think they can take, like, I think we live in a world where you can judge people pretty quickly just within five minutes of meeting them, but you can also, a picture is worth a thousand words, so you can look at somebody and you can say, oh, I, I like, oh, I like how they took that picture, or, oh, I like their, the back of the office looks clean, or, you know, oh, wow, what is, why is there a dumpster next to the clinic area, or whatever it might be.

There can be some cues that the, that the patient scrolling might pick up on. I think the, it's still not just about the picture, it's about the picture that drives you to stop and then read the caption, and the caption is the powerful message, is, I got you to stop to look at my picture, whatever the picture is of, because I need you to hear my message about recurrent pregnancy loss, or egg freezing, or semen analysis, or whatever the message you're trying to send is. So patients want to.

I think it plays. Want to see the, the, a description of a particular topic on Instagram as well? Yeah, they, they do, and there are some people who will take, you can create like a graphic or a cartoon on Instagram and use that as the picture to, and then have a caption, so let's talk about ovulation prediction kits, right, so we have like a, there's one, one person who does this really well, they make really nice cartoons using freeware that you can get in the app store, and they're, the, the cartoons are really well done, but it's all about the captions, but if you make basic, simple cartoons that just say eight, you know, like five things today, that gets less engagement than a picture of you perhaps projecting the message that you're trying to share. So is Instagram the blog 2.0? Yeah, I think so, because the word limit is longer, like you can, and yes, because what ends up happening is people have a blog, and they repurpose what they put on the blog into an Instagram caption.

So to summarize, websites are vital as means of giving patients sort of an impression of that practice, a go-to about the workings of the practice, staff information, statistics about the actual accomplishments of the practice, things like that, it's really the bio of the practice, if you will, and sounds like Facebook is another level of engagement to provide patients with updated information, more dynamic, more fluid, in terms of this just came in, we want to share this with the information, not to alarm you, or to reassure you, or maybe to show some concerns, whereas Instagram now, as you're saying, is a way to probably get into the inside of a physician's practice, of knowing what they're about. Yeah, I'd say Instagram is a little more intimate. Intimate, yeah, and of course, education with the blogs.

Okay, so we hit those top three, anything on the horizon that patients should be looking for even more than those three? I don't know so much if it's what's on the horizon as how things are going to shuffle, so I've seen a lot of the people on Instagram, like one particular person who's very active on Instagram, who's really good at it, is spending a lot of time building her Twitter presence. You know, I almost kind of wonder if that's a barometer of things to come, people will start to migrate back to Twitter, because Twitter is Twitter. I mean, it's a cesspool of commentary sometimes, but it still is kind of there, regardless of what's happening, whereas Instagram has traditionally been the happiest place on the internet, stereotypically, so I wonder if that moniker will remain.

In your estimation, Ken, what is the infertility patient's go-to platform? If they had to learn about a physician, or a medical practice, or even fertility in general, from a credible source, where would they want to go? I think they'd probably go to Instagram, that seems to be where they already are, and I think there could be some, I mean, we talked about this at this meeting today, I mean, there's some generational differences between Gen X, Millennials, and then the upcoming Generation Z, which is, I guess, under 21, so I think it will be a product of just how the physicians are still going to be there practicing, the patients will be transitioning from one generation to another, and I think it will just have to, it might be challenging, because it might require the physician or the practice to kind of adapt to the changing needs of the demographic. I find something interesting about direct messaging. We have, of course, Facebook and Instagram, and I find that patients want to send their messages through there, as opposed to the patient portal through our electronic health record.

Right. They'll see us on Facebook and send messages through there sometimes. We get a lot from the patient portal as well.

Is social media a way for patients to also connect with their practice, and is that what they want? It certainly is a way to connect, but I don't endorse it as a reliable way to connect. I think it's a, I think it could be a frustrating way for a patient to connect, because it is not a, it's not a reliable way to connect, because a good practice, and most of the practices that administer social media accounts, there's someone monitoring them, or there's a canned message that comes out if a post, you know, if someone asks a question. But I would still stick to the traditional, which is kind of cool that it's now the traditional mode of communication, is through the electronic medical record in most centers, or through the phone.

I often admire when there are opportunities for patients to have live feeds to interact and ask questions, because it seems like they don't have an ability to get their questions answered. Not all practices are as forthcoming, although we have a lot of excellent physicians. They are somewhat starved for information, whether they've engaged a fertility practice or not.

Yeah, so there's two different patient populations there. There's the people who are in a practice who have questions about IVF, and most practices have some sort of IVF orientation where they teach patients about the IVF process and do injection teaching. Those require a lot of time on the patient's part to come in.

Those could be done remotely through these platforms or through other, you know, other secure platforms, though the information that is being presented is not individualized. So in theory, you could use a social media platform, as I think about this on the fly, to present kind of generic education to a patient group, because we have injection teaching videos. We have videos talking about how IVF works, so that could easily replace that.

Well, this has been fantastic. I gained a lot of information. I know our listeners did as well, Kenan and yes, go ahead.

Yeah, I did want to make one other point. I wanted to kind of make a final point. You asked kind of what the future is, and I think it's important to understand where the future is.

You got to understand how we got here, and you kind of asked this question earlier, but you know, the internet 1.0 was a pretty static place, right? 1995, you had a website. It was static. No engagement.

Here's what I'm doing, and here's what it is. And then over the next decade, then you got more multimedia. Your processing power got better.

And then with the uprise of the smartphone in 2007, with the iPhone and the mass proliferation of the device and the improvement of cellular technology, then you get now the opportunity to share all of this content, specifically high quality video content and audio content to the masses. So now everyone is a director, co-producer of their own show. So now that has totally transformed.

You know, we talked about the website. The website is still a dynamic place, but it compared to the other technologies is still kind of static, which is crazy to me. But I think that was just one point I wanted to make.

So this has been great. Thanks for having me, and thanks for doing this. Well, this has been fantastic.

I've gained a lot of information, and I know our listeners did as well. I want to thank Dr. Kenan Omurtag from Washington University in St. Louis. And this is the SART Patient Podcast.

Until next time, I'm your host, Dr. Mark Trolice. Thank you for listening. Thanks for having me.

Thank you for listening to SART Fertility Experts, your resource for information on IVF. If you found this podcast useful, please like us on your favorite social media platform and tell your friends about us. For more family-building resources, visit www.sart.org slash patient dash information or www.reproductivefacts.org