The Writing Is on the Wall: How Albert Einstein College of Medicine’s Blog Fits into Its Broader Communication Strategy
// By Lisa D. Ellis //
Blogging is becoming an increasingly important way to communicate with your target audience. And it can also provide a valuable forum for your staff to share their experiences and ideas within the larger organization and beyond.
The Doctor’s Tablet
This lesson comes from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, where some forward-thinking staff members created a blog back in 2012 called The Doctor’s Tablet, which has since become a valuable channel that allows faculty, students, and other medical staff to effectively share their expertise broadly within the large organization, as well as within the medical field as a whole. Other health systems can benefit from following this example to use their medical and professional staff, and residents, to educate others about a variety of topics from their unique perspectives.
Finding a Way to Be Heard
Albert Einstein College of Medicine, a part of Montefiore, runs one of the largest residency and fellowship training programs in the United States for medical and dental professionals. With a total of seven education programs that employ close to 2,000 full-time faculty members, and serve nearly 2,500 students (including M.D., Ph.D., and MSTP students and postdocs), there is a lot of expertise to go around. But it also makes it essential to have just the right channel to distribute the information so it doesn’t get drowned out within the large network. This is where The Doctor’s Tablet is making a difference, providing a readily accessible forum.
From Concept to Reality
David Flores, social media manager at Albert Einstein College of Medicine
When The Doctor’s Tablet began, the school was looking for a way to expand upon and showcase the work being done by faculty, students, and staff at Einstein, according to David Flores, social media manager at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who serves as one of the blog’s two editors. “It was clear to us that while we were able to give some attention to what these individuals were doing through other means—press releases and feature articles on our website—the opportunity to have them author posts would be impressive and unique compared to what we were seeing in the medical education blog universe,” Flores explains. That’s why he and his co-editor put their journalism background to work creating this forum that allows the contributors to make a real difference in the medical field.
“Most posts on The Doctor’s Tablet are written by the authors and edited by myself and Gordon Earle, associate dean of communications and public affairs,” Flores points out. “The authors have ranged from Einstein’s Dean Allen Spiegel to faculty researchers and clinicians to first-year M.D. students just learning their way around the classrooms and labs at Einstein,” he says.