Speaker: Kevin Vicker, Children’s Hospital Colorado
What have you enjoyed most about your membership in SocialMedia.org Health?
Kevin Vicker: Working in social media, it's very dynamic. It's constantly changing. And then you add working in social media for a hospital and healthcare is a very complex, heavily regulated industry. And so what's great about SocialMedia.org Health, is it's connecting me with other people at other hospitals around the country that are in this very same niche that I'm in. And I think what that does is it just creates, you know, conversation that's very on point with things that I can relate to that we're dealing with at our hospital. So whether it's a call, the in-person meetings, or something that's just happening on a message board in the Member Center, it's always very relatable, and that's something that I don't get when I try to to network with other industries and people that are working on social media outside of the healthcare space.
Could you describe a time when the community helped you?
Kevin Vicker: During the COVID-19 pandemic, we were looking at how to address vaccine hesitancy once vaccines started to become available to kids. We knew that adult systems have been offering vaccines to their patients earlier than we could as a children's hospital. And so it was really valuable to be able to understand what were they doing to encourage vaccines, what kind of criticism were they getting? It helped us know what to expect. And it also kind of helped us know that our ideas for how to address vaccine hesitancy were really pretty similar to what our peers were doing around the country. It made us just feel better that that our approach was on point.
What sets SocialMedia.org Health apart from other organizations?
Kevin Vicker: There's really a lot of different ways to get involved. It's not just like a monthly conference call or something like that. There's usually one or two calls a week, activity pretty much every day in the message board on the Member Center. The in-person meetings are in different parts of the country, different times of the year. You can even get into the membership directory and connect with another hospital or two, individually and have a conversation about something that's not a topic coming up on the official agenda of activities. So it's really valuable to have so many different ways to to connect and network with peers at other hospitals.
