Blogging can be a great way for healthcare organizations to connect with patients, families and other important audiences. But in a hospital organization, it can be difficult to decide what sort of blog is best.
Recently, my colleague Jason Snyder and I spoke to hospital marketing and public relations pros on this topic at the Hospital Council of Western Pennsylvania, which represents more than 60 hospital organizations in 30 counties in Pennsylvania.
There are many great blogs published by hospital organizations. The Mayo Clinic, for example, continues to evolve its blogging and has grown from just a handful written by staff to dozens that combine the viewpoints of medical staff, administrators, patients, caregivers and others. Here’s a list of some of the best hospital blogs across the country. 
Our Hospital Council presentation identified three key questions for hospital organizations to answer when considering a blog.
1. First and foremost, what is the purpose of the blog? Like all other flavors of social media, having a blog just because you think you should have one is not a good reason to start publishing. Among the flavors of social media, a blog requires the deepest content, published most frequently, to be effective. Good reasons to blog include highlighting new service lines (for instance, a new heart or stroke center), creating new communities of interest (connecting stroke survivors and caregivers for post-procedure care) or simply sharing the vision of the organization or its leadership.
2. Second, what is the voice of the blog? Even in a comparatively small hospital organization, the staff can include dozens of administrators, doctors, nursing staff and other professionals. So it’s important to first determine whether the blog will be “institutional,” that is, one that represents the entire organization, or one that is personal. The benefit of an institutional blog is that the work of blogging can be shared among many people, providing variety. The difficulty in writing an institutional blog comes in maintaining a consistent personality or voice as different authors contribute. A personal blog can come from the hospital CEO, medical director, a leading specialist, the chief nursing officer, a dietician — whoever is most appropriate to the purpose of the blog. The challenge in writing a blog that is personal comes in finding enough topics to blog regularly.
3. And that leads to this: A good hospital blog must provide a healthy diet of blog topics. That means, as with the advice we should all apply in our own diets, a good variety of blog posts that vary in length, types of content, and calls to action. As a Hubspot partner agency, we help our clients maximize social media to engage their audiences. Blogging is a key tool. We love how Hubspot characterizes a good blog diet as including posts that are like raisin bran, roasts, spinach, chocolate cake and Tabasco.
Want to know more about how to start, or improve a hospital blog? Click here for two downloadable tools that will provide links and resources for blogging, and WordWrite’s take on examples of a good hospital blog diet.
