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In the past five years, Mount Sinai Health System dealt with navigating two major nursing strikes, ongoing negotiations with 17 unions (the health system employs more than 48,000 people), payer disputes, hospital shootings and severe weather (blizzards, Nor’easters, oh my!).

Oh, did we mention that all of this was after COVID?  

If you want to learn how your hospital can deal with a crisis on social media, we’ve got the session for you at #HCIC26 (Oct. 25-28 in Orlando). Karen Wish and Chloe Politis from Mount Sinai Health System will present, “One Post from Chaos: Optimizing Social Media in a Healthcare Crisis.”

While the session is focused on social media during a crisis, the lessons they’ll share apply to anyone in charge of a hospital’s reputation. This includes press teams, patient communications, internal comms, media relations and leaders who make the final call.

Here’s a little bit more about what the duo will discuss.

Earn your leadership’s trust

Politis, Director of Social Media at Mount Sinai Health System, says she’s spent a lot of time building trust with executive leadership, government affairs, legal, labor and security teams long before any crisis hits. Her three-member social media team monitors the full social conversation around Mount Sinai Health System and reports what they find to every group that needs to know when there’s a crisis.

“When something breaks, I know right off the bat who I need to email and say, ‘This is happening in real time on social media. In 30 minutes, you will have a full report with all the information that I can gather,’” Politis says. “Speed matters because if I don’t flag a crisis, someone else will. Our team’s job is to minimize our leadership team going into a crisis cycle. They know they can trust us to tell them what’s going on.”

During an active event, Politis refreshes data every 15 to 30 minutes. She monitors what news outlets, political figures and influencers are saying, too.

Everything the social team publishes lines up with holding statements from the press team, internal announcements, FAQs and/or dedicated websites about the crisis. That consistency matters because internal messages don’t always stay internal. An employee could take a screenshot and post it to social media, Politis says.

“We don’t go rogue,” Politis says. “All of our messaging is consistent.”

Is silence golden?

Not every crisis calls for a post. Wish, VP, Chief Marketing Officer, Strategic Communications Lead, says there’s a “healthy collaboration” between operations teams focused on fixing the problem and communications teams focused on what audiences need to hear. Governance keeps those groups aligned.

“Who approves the messaging? When do we stop content? When do we activate content? These are all questions your team needs to think about during a crisis,” Wish says. 

For example, during a recent nursing strike, the team made different choices at different moments.

“Sometimes, we paused content,” Wish says. “Sometimes, we waited for confirmation on what to post based on guidance from the negotiation team. Sometimes, we stayed silent because we didn’t want to amplify confusion or share information before it was verified. But silence during a crisis should always be intentional and strategic. It’s important to continually assess when communication will provide clarity and reassurance, and when it may be more appropriate to wait until there is meaningful, accurate information to share.”

Oh, and good news: Not everything is a crisis!

“While someone might read a negative comment and take that as a crisis, if our social media team reads a negative comment, we look at the user. Is it spam? Is it a bot account? What are they responding to?” Politis says. “Sometimes, things fade within an hour.”

Stay calm and carry on

And when things are blowing up online, how does the team stay calm?

“We model the behavior of being calm,” Wish says. “We convey the sense of, ‘We’ve got this,’ because the truth is, we do have it.”  

Politis says she reminds her team not to absorb the negativity they read during a crisis, especially comments aimed at the people behind the accounts.

“I tell them not to take what they’re seeing personally,” Politis says. “I always keep my door open and check in with everybody as much as I can. We also have a debrief after major events. No one is dealing with a crisis alone. Together, as a hospital system, we’re dealing with it together.”