Scribble Chats: Healthcare
A discussion around best practices for hosting healthcare chats.
by Miles Kenyon
We'll be joined by expert content creators who will pull back the hospital gown and share their success stories with hosting healthcare chats: Michael Vaughn and Jerry Hoehle from Hearst Media, Valarie Basheda from WebMD and Elizabeth Neporent from ABC News.
The chat will take place Wednesday, December 18 at 12:00pm EST.
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We're about you start in 10 minutes! If you have any questions for our experts, please feel free to submit them.
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Good afternoon, everyone! Welcome to this week's Scribble Chat
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Health may be the great connector, making equals of serfs and kings alike. And with advents in technology, we're now seeing healthcare being accessed in many novel ways.
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Today, we'll be chatting with an esteemed pan who's bringing health online and making it real-time
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Liz Neporent has spent her entire career helping people realize their fitness dreams and improving their health. She passionately believes in the power of healthy living as a means to a better life. It’s important to her that health information is based on real science and delivered in a truthful manner. She is a Health & Medical reporter, ABC News National.
Liz Neporentby Miles Kenyon -
Valarie Basheda is director of News and Editorial Content at WebMD. In that role, she coordinates WebMD’s news coverage, special reports and expert blogs. In the past year, she created the content strategy for WebMD’s Affordable Care Act health center. Under her leadership, WebMD’s editorial coverage has won numerous awards, including several first place awards from the Society of Professional Journalists. Before coming to WebMD, Basheda had several editing positions at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, including front page editor. She has also worked at American Journalism Review, the Detroit Free Press andDetroit News. She has a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Maryland and a bachelor’s degree in English from Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa.
Valarie Bashedaby Miles Kenyon -
Michael Vaughn has worked behind the scenes with KCCI Television in Des Moines for 5 years. Half of the time behind a studio camera during morning newscasts, and half working with online advertising and social media for KCCI.com. He has built and moderated 25 healthcare related chats in the past 2 years.
Michael Vaughnby Miles Kenyon -
Jerry Hoehle is the Digital Sales Manager at KCCI TV, CBS Affiliate in Des Moines, Iowa. He’s worked in Digital Sales for over 13 years and loves it! Jerry is also a proud father of two kids and enjoys performing with his Bluegrass Band on the weekends.
Jerry Hoehleby Miles Kenyon -
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To get things started, I'd like Valarie to briefly explain the types of chats that WebMD has run.
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Sure. We've been running chats every Tuesday since October. Most have been pretty open ended, focusing on helping people understand how to use the new Marketplaces. We also had a few topic specific ones for young adults and people with pre-existing conditions. -
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Jerry and I work at KCCI-TV8 the CBS Affiliate in Des Moines, IA. We have done a number of chats on specific topics with a local hospital, and many with the personal dietitians of a large local grocery chain. -
The Dietitian chats were also paired with our on air broadcast of Dr Oz, the chatter was answering questions in the background of an On-Air segment during the local breaks of Dr Oz.
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Elizabeth, you've also run quite a few chats with ABC. What have they focused on?
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We do an ABC health tweet chat most Tuesdays under the hashtag #abcDRBchat. The Dr. B stands for Dr. Richard Besser who is our chief health and medical correspondent. Our chats run one hour and cover a variety of topics - everything from yoga and meditation to colon cancer. Along side the chat we do a scribble live blog where we post the best tweets plus other facts, videos, vines, gifs, ect. We then build this into a home page article along with the full transcript on storify. -
So you use Scribble to centralize and augment the conversation that's happening on Twitter
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Michael, what kind of readers do you typically get coming to these chats?
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Yes, I live blog it in real time as the tweet chat is running. It's a convenient way to pull out the best content as well as share past content and the great content our experts and attendees share with us.
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Our questions come from a broad sample of the Des Moines area audience,
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It also helps with promotion. I do a quick homepage post with the Scribble embedded below before hand so viewers get an idea of what's coming up.
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We promote the chat on air, during Dr Oz. and we also make sure to mention it on Facebook, and through ads on our homepage.
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The audience has skewed more female than male, but so has our Facebook page, and Dr Oz's demographic, so this isn't surprising.
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Valarie and Liz, how about yourselves? Is there a "typical" reader who interacts with your chats?
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All of our chats were related to the Affordable Care Act. So we’re seeing all types of people trying to understand it. Moms, small business owners, retirees, people with pre-existing conditions. As time went on, we also found a lot of people asking us for help when healthcare.gov wasn’t working.
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Well for us it depends on the topic. We have a mix of experts, advocates, patients and interested parties. Our recent lung cancer chat brought in quite a few of the cancer organizations but more than anything, tons of patients. The lung cancer community is quite organized and vocal. Very active on social.
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Liz, are we seeing people come and actually asking legitimate questions about their health to these professionals?
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Or are people more coming out of a general interest?
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Oh yes! Again taking the recent lung cancer chat - there was quite a lot of back and forth. However, we don't set up our chats in a Q&A format. They are too busy and if we do it that way it becomes too noisy. Instead we organize by topics and people respond to the specific topic using the "T" up front. So, if Topic 1 is lung cancer risks, all responses would start with the hashtag, then T1: Patients can still get questions answered in this way.
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Valarie, you also have readers coming with questions specific to their health, correct?
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Definitely! When it comes to insurance, readers almost had to give us some personal details around things like income to get specific answers to their questions. They’d want to know if they could get a subsidy, for instance. We might also hear about what medical conditions they have, whether they are employed, sometimes even what medications they’re taking.
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Valarie, do you think readers have any trepidation about parting with these personal details?
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They might have, but I think they were more interested in sharing the information because it’s such a confusing topic and they really want some help.
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And because healthcare.gov wasn't working for a while, they needed places to turn to for advice.
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On our end, I think anonymity definitely helps, I usually remind viewers a few times during the chat that they only need to choose a name. We’ve had some very honest conversations about treatment for depression (Link), and Gynecologic Cancers (Link). Both of these would be difficult conversations if the viewer’s name and picture was publicly shared.
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Is this what any of you expected when you started these chats?
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I have found people have no trouble sharing their personal details.
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Also - we get a lot of video and image tweets which I think is pretty awesome.
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Yes. You get some people telling you their life story!
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I really like that connection with our readers. I sense they like it too.
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That's so interesting because I assumed people would hold these chats fairly close to their chests.
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In our case, it was interesting because you could also see as the chats went on that people were becoming smarter about how things worked and asked more complicated questions.
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I view it as a gap in online communication skills, everyone has different personal boundaries online.
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If you think about it, people have long been comfortable with the Internet share. Just look at the comments section below any content and it is quite shocking what people post sometimes. This is just one more way they can share what they are thinking without any face to face.
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Are there legal restrictions to what you can and can't say in a health setting? -
What are your editorial standards when it comes to health? Are you more accepting of confidentiality/sensitivity? Are there subjects you just avoid completely?