Patients trust practitioners to deliver important information and help them make life-changing decisions about their health. One thing — or one TikTok — that breaks that trust may have them going elsewhere.
In September 2025, several healthcare workers at Sutter Health’s Pesetas Urgent Care clinic in Santa Barbara, California drew controversy when they filmed a TikTok video mocking patients. The video showed staff posing with what appeared to be bodily fluid stains on exam table paper, with captions such as “Guess the substance.”
The post quickly went viral and resulted in a swift wave of blowback against the workers and Sutter Health itself. According to reporting from the Santa Barbara Independent, the facility received waves of one-star ratings on Yelp that week directly related to the incident.
The report mentions that one review called out the fact that the workers were “stupid enough to post these pictures with their faces.” “Makes me not trust their competence as medical professionals,” the reviewer wrote. “I am considering leaving [their parent organization] as a whole after this … These are extremely cruel, genuinely soulless, heartless, and brainless people.”
It was soon discovered that Pesetas Clinic’s employees had posted several other videos appearing to make fun of patients, indicating a larger culture of disrespect and indifference to patient privacy.
The offending employees were quickly terminated, but the incident still raised significant questions about Sutter Health’s overall culture. The presence of several derogatory videos online had created the perception that the organization had tolerated a culture of disrespect toward patients.
This incident illustrates the importance of social media screening in healthcare. If someone at Sutter Health had been made aware of the first offending video as soon as it was posted, the organization may have been able to:
- discipline the offending employee(s) more quickly
- taken the incident as a sign to implement additional rules and expectations regarding social media use and patient care
- and avoid the perception that they were “soft” on employee misconduct
For employers that already struggle to screen workers efficiently, social media screening may seem prohibitively difficult or time-consuming. But as the example above shows, social media screening is becoming an increasingly important way to identify potentially problematic behaviors before they impact your workplace, patients or reputation.
In this post, learn why social media screening is becoming so important for mitigating reputational risk in healthcare, how to implement an effective social media screening strategy, and what to look for in a social media screening partner.
Why social media screening is becoming critical in healthcare
Traditionally, healthcare background checks screened for a wide variety of potential risk signals that might impact someone’s eligibility and ability to practice: criminal activity, license status, sex abuse history, etc.
However, these checks may only surface issues that went through the justice system or a licensing board. They don’t identify other possible warning signs that could impact someone’s continued eligibility to practice, like a tendency toward disclosing sensitive patient information, using abusive or racist language, or a history of violence that hasn’t yet resulted in an arrest. Social media screening can uncover some of these tendencies and surface risk signals more quickly.
Other benefits of social media screening for healthcare for organizations include:
Mitigate patient risk and safety concerns: Screens for potential signs of violence, bullying, or other forms of dangerous behavior.
Safeguard patient privacy: Identify individuals who may have previously posted private patient information, taken photos in restricted clinical areas, or discussed cases inappropriately.
Defend brand reputation: Uncover potential public displays unprofessional behavior or alignment with ideologies that could damage the organization’s reputation in the community.
Validate candidate/employee information: Confirm details in a resume, such as previous employment or professional associations, by reviewing their public online footprint.
Identify discriminatory or inappropriate conduct: Discover signs of hate speech, prejudice, or severe misconduct that may not be apparent during an interview.
Prevent medical misinformation: Your organization may choose not to employ individuals that share medical misinformation. In this case, social media screening could surface candidates that tend to spread inaccurate or unverified medical information. Identifying these patterns early can help you meet your organization’s standards and align with your goals for patient care.
Best practices for implementing social media screening in healthcare
Frame social media screening as a risk identification protocol, not an invasion of privacy: Without proper context, employees might perceive social media screening as an invasion of privacy, or a sign that you don’t trust them. When rolling out the policy, communicate to your employees that your intention is not to monitor their personal lives as a whole, but to identify specific risk factors and safeguard your reputation as an employer and patient care provider.
Also make clear that you are not screening people based on their personal opinions or beliefs — only for public behaviors that may create risk for your organization or violate your policies, such as threats, harassment, or discriminatory conduct.
Create a standardized personal conduct policy: Social media screening monitors each individual’s alignment with your company standards and expectations. To promote consistency, establish a clear, written policy outlining what constitutes unprofessional content online. Having a documented policy can help hiring and HR teams make more consistent decisions and help employees understand what will or will not be considered a violation.
Understand the potential risks of social media screening: Social media screenings for employment have the potential to result in discrimination claims, privacy violations, and legal action if not conducted with certain guardrails in place. Below we’ll outline some of these potential risks.
- Protected characteristics: Viewing an applicant’s social media can expose hiring managers to protected characteristics, such as race, religion, age, sexual orientation, or family status. This has the potential to result in claims of unfair discrimination under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
- Biased decision-making: Manually checking certain individuals’ profiles and not others, or allowing personal preferences or preconceived notions to play a role in decision-making, can be seen as discriminatory actions and potentially expose you to claims. This is where outsourcing your social media screening can become valuable. Using a third-party provider can help shield hiring managers from direct exposure to protected characteristics during the screening and helps you create a more consistent and transparent screening process. This can help you create a more policy-driven way to mitigate brand harm and identify behaviors that result in risk to the workplace
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- Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) violations: When using third-party services for social media checks, employers must comply with FCRA rules regarding applicant disclosure and adverse action protocols. This includes obtaining consent, providing disclosure forms, and following the necessary pre-adverse and adverse action protocols if you take adverse action based on the results of a social media check.
- Data privacy laws: More than half of US states prohibit employers from requiring candidates to share passwords or access private, non-public accounts. As a result, the best practice may be to limit your screening to public profiles.
- Data accuracy issues: Information found on social media is often unverified, has a higher likelihood to be taken out of context, or can easily be confused with another person, which can cause decisions to be based on inaccurate data or information.
- Incorporate human review into social media screening: Keyword screening can surface posts that on their own may not be indicative of violations of your company standards. And often, social media posts and interactions require additional context to be fully understood, especially if they’re being used to make adverse hiring decisions. So make sure that your team is also incorporating human decision-making into their review of any content which may violate your standards or policies.
How Accurate handles social media screening
Accurate provides social media screening to help you uncover part of an individual’s history that may not appear in a traditional criminal background check, safeguard your brand reputation, and hire individuals that meet your organization’s standards. Learn how Accurate handles social media screening below:
- Search scope: Accurate searches only publicly available information posted over the past seven years. This includes public posts, images and text, as well as likes, comments, replies and reposts.
- Broad search coverage: Our search coverage includes Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest, X, boards, blogs, forums, and more across 12 different risk classifiers.
- Configurable search packages: Social media content is reviewed across defined risk classifiers (hate speech, insults/bullying, threats of violence) and compliance keywords (“harassment,” “quit,” “fired,” etc.). If content meets any of those criteria, it is included in the report. Companies can choose which risk classifiers or compliance keywords are included in their reports. This helps employers align their screening with their policies and identify risk tolerance.
- Quick turnaround times: Average turnaround time is 24 to 48 hours.
- Global coverage: Screening reports can be provided in 8 languages and translated into over 200 additional languages after the initial report has been completed.
