Lee Aase is Director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, which builds on Mayo Clinic’s leadership among healthcare providers in adopting social media tools. Mayo Clinic is a pioneer in hospital blogging and has the most popular medical provider channel on YouTube as well as active, popular outposts on Twitter and Facebook.
With Medical Director Farris Timimi, MD, Lee also provides leadership for the Social Media Health Network, a project of the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media which enables those interested in healthcare applications of social media to join in common cause with Mayo Clinic to share best practices and overcome barriers to effective social media adoption. When it launched in 2010, the Network originally included only employees of member organizations, but now also offers individual memberships for those working in healthcare as well as associate memberships for patient advocates, students and academic faculty.
In addition to outposts on general-purpose social networking sites, Mayo Clinic has created an online community for patients and consumers. Through its Center for Social Media, Mayo aims to drive application of social media in clinical practice, education and research.
By night, Lee is Chancellor of Social Media University, Global (SMUG), a free online higher education institution that provides practical, hands-on training in social media for lifelong learners. Lee’s travels as an evangelist for social media in healthcare have taken him throughout the United States and to Australia, Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden.
Prior to joining Mayo Clinic in 2000, Lee spent more than a decade in political and government communications at the local, state and federal level.
