Let’s Go Social: The VA’s Approach to New Media From Top to Bottom

Professional Development Workshop Set 4

Monday, Oct. 15, 11:45 a.m.–1 p.m.

Room: Golden Gate C1

Hosted by the Health Academy.

The Department of Veterans Affairs took bold moves to ensure the nation’s largest health care entity was making strides to engage with patients and staff via social media sites. This entailed convincing key leaders of the need for a social media presence, ensuring accountability for messaging and responses, creating a fan base that would garner thousands of fans, and developing Standard Operating Procedures and policies that would be in place for the Veterans Health Administration’s (VHA) more than 200,000 employees and millions of Veterans.

Understand how to create policies, standard operating procedures (SOP) and flowcharts to help your organization prepare for social media.
Discover how the roll out impacted the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) facilities, their interactions and lessons learned.
Learn from analytics available within the platforms for research, measurement and evaluation.

Final Presentation

(Available to registered attendees only. )

Presenters

Matt Rutherford, MBA, MPH

Matt Rutherford, MBA, MPH, joined the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2006 and is currently a health systems specialist in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Office of Media Management. Rutherford is responsible for devising, implementing and overseeing VHA’s social media and Web strategies and regularly works with Public Affairs staff and Web Content Managers throughout VHA to improve the administration’s medical center and program office Internet websites and social media sites.

Michael Hill-Jackson
Deputy Public Affairs Officer
VA Palo Alto Health Care System