Not all reality TV is Kardashians and singing competitions. This summer ABC News launched “NY Med,” described as a “medical docuseries” that takes you inside the walls of New York Presbyterian Hospital (NYPH) (airing Tuesdays at 10pm and available on ABC.com). This sobering, informative, and often difficult-to-watch reality show makes you remember how amazing TV can be to tell you stories about real people.
The producers of the show and the doctors and nurses that are featured in the show (including TV personality Dr. Oz who also works at NYPH) are all embracing the social web to get the word out about their eight-part series.
The Executive Producer of NY Med on getting patients to agree to participate in the show and becoming an expert on hospitals:
Executive Producer Terry Wrong has made a career of spending the last decade in hospitals. He previously produced “Hopkins” and “Boston Med” that looked at the worlds of two other hospitals. One of the many gripping story lines comes in episode two when we learn about a patient who needs a liver transplant. We asked Wrong how he gets patients to agree to take part in the show. “Transplants are never difficult – they have been invalided and sick for some time, they are very used to the medical routine, known they’ve needed a transplant for quite a while and understand the cause and effect between creating a donor population and getting an organ,” Wrong told Lost Remote. “When you tell them we’d like to do a story about transplants that will potentially create [more donors, they agree] – we know over the series that we’ve increased donor population,” he added.
Wrong didn’t think he’d spend a huge part of his career studying, learning and making television of out some of the country’s top hospitals. “It was Phyllis McGrady‘s idea, my long time boss for 16 years, the executive in charge of long time programs,” Wrong described. “She’d had illness in her families and had become curious of the culture in her hospital – small air worthy cameras, digital cameras, were coming on the market, that we were able to get network audio,” allowing them to produce such shows like Hopinks and later Boston Med.
How Wrong and Series Producer Monica DelaRosa created a social TV strategy:
Wrong recognized that “NY Med” was the first of his medical series that would air in the age of social TV. “I use Facebook a lot – I have not been a great user of Twitter but I do tweet,” he told Lost Remote. “I’m not the type of person that likes to tweet the mundane event – what I’m eating, my family, pretty photos when I’m on vacation – I tweet articles from the newspaper, in traditional media, that engaged me in some way,” He added. “Like my parents when they used to cut out articles and mail them to me at sleep away camp.”
The social TV success and responsibility of “NY Med” falls upon Series Producer Monica DelaRosa who described how small their team is. “We don’t have dedicated social media or digital producers,” she told Lost Remote. “We’re actually a very small team and wear many hats – there are three or four of us that stay from the very beginning to the end, that’s a very rare.” She added that “I’m there from research to filming and shooting and to post production…editing and trying to make sense of all footage.”
She described their social TV strategy, designed very quickly after they found out exactly when the show would air, just a month to spare. “As the news organization has matured…the department has grown more and more, she explained. “I’m just one person, it’s not easy, I came out with an idea that we need a developer [for a website] – it wasn’t as easy to do, but we got it done,” she added. They also, “knew we had to be on Facebook.”
They then thought about how they can use the fan bases from their previous shows to launch the new show. They launched a website designed by Avatar New York, launched a Facebook page, Twitter page and offered GetGlue stickers for every other episode. “I’ve been surprised by how many people checked in there, we didn’t ally promote it, people find you,” DelaRosa told Lost Remote about their GetGlue activation.
Hosting a Twitter chat with the doctors and nurses:
Join @nymedabc, @nypresbyterian and me for a live Twitter chat on 8/1 at 1p EST. Ask your questions about the show and include #NYMED
– Dr. Mehmet Oz (@DrOz) July 30, 2012
They even hosted a Twitter chat after last week’s episodes where TV personality and NYPH resident Dr. Oz (who has his own show and over 2 million followers). DelaRose described that, “we picked an episode in the middle of the run, to wait ’till show got steam, to get everyone involved to tweet about it the next day – so all the doctors and nurses and producers, we were all on the twitter chat.”
Producing a live Twitter chat was of course different then filming endless hours of TV footage that would then hit the editing rooms. DelaRose was worried that something might come up but that “thank god nothing happened and schedules cleared up…we had a very active chat.”
Nurses and Doctors from NYPH using social media:
Nurse Marina Dedivanovic is one of the characters who we see helping patients in each episode even as one tries to ask her out on a date (she later obliges after the patient gets better and returns to visit). DelaRose described that she has already “trippled her followers” on Twitter. We spoke with Nurse Dedivanovic (who’s role on the show will grow even bigger over the next two episodes) about her experiences on NY Med.
Lost Remote: What’s it been like to be on TV? Has it been a positive experience?
Marina Dedivanovic: It’s been a great and very shocking yet positive experience to be seen on national television. After 16 long months of being filmed every moment while at work finally seeing yourself on TV is still hard to believe.