In creating your own personal social media presence, you ... tobeGIM campaign as a vehicle to engage trainees ... amazing potential to improve patient care and ...
SGIM FORUM 2016; 39(6) SHARE
COMMENTARY
Vox Popularis: Social Media and Medicine Amanda Clark, MD, and Avital O’Glasser, MD, FACP Dr. Clark (@amandavclark) is an academic hospitalist at the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center and associate program director of the Internal Medicine Residency Program at Case Western Reserve University. Dr. O’Glasser (@aoglasser) is an academic hospitalist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, OR.
here is no denying it. We are living in the social media era. Facebook is a year shy of becoming a teenager (it celebrated its 12th birthday on February 4, 2016); MySpace has fizzled; Twitter has gone global; and Instagram, Snapchat, and countless other vehicles for communication in the modern era continue to evolve. As a practicing physician, you might find yourself dismayed by the ways in which readily available information of varying degrees of accuracy has impacted your clinical practice. Rumors, anecdotes, and misinformation are easy to find and harder to dispel. In creating your own personal social media presence, you might have been challenged to draw the line between your professional and private lives. Do you let patients “friend” you? Do you share pictures of your family? Do your casual vacation photos affect your image as a smartly dressed and smart clinician? With this issue of SGIM Forum we encourage you to consider the benefits of a social media presence for you as a physician and of utilizing the ever-expanding Internet and mobile-based technologies at our disposal. To do so, let us briefly step outside the world of medicine. The Broadway musical Hamilton, a rap/hip-hop musical about the life and times of Alexander Hamilton, has taken the theater industry, pop culture, and the Internet by storm. The musical, its creator Lin-Manual Miranda, and its cast have maintained vibrant social media presences. Last December, the musical (@HamiltonMusical) hit 1 million tweets in 2015. One million! Articles about the feat have described
T
1
how the stars have used Twitter to connect with and energize hundreds of thousands of fans, stating, “Twitter is the only place where theater fans can connect directly with the creators, actors, and other fans of the show and communicate without barriers.”1 Moving from art to politics, Mrs. Michelle Obama was recently the subject of a journalistic essay on how she had mastered social media.2 To quote Mrs. Obama, “[Social media] bypasses the middle man…they [the public] can feel the passion, [and] they don’t have to have it filtered through another source.” The article lauds Mrs. Obama’s use of social media to engage the public on her awareness campaigns with characteristics commonly attributed to master clinicians: being personable, accessible, authentic, and relatable. Let us now return to social media and medicine. Twitter has become increasingly popular in the medical community. More hospitals, health care organizations, and medical societies are joining each year. Twitter allows those in health care to efficiently keep current with medical news and literature. Journals tweet their latest issues and articles; health care professionals use social media as a platform to discuss opinions regarding new studies or guidelines (e.g. the 2013 cholesterol guidelines, the American Board of Internal Medicine Maintenance of Certification procedures, and the cost of hepatitis C treatment). Physicians can connect nationally and internationally based on an area of specialty. “Meeting tweeting” and dedicated hashtags for large conferences allow attendees to share and circulate meeting
themes and take-home sound bites. SGIM itself has launched its #ProudtobeGIM campaign as a vehicle to engage trainees and new members in promoting primary care. In addition to peer-to-peer engagement, the medical uses of social media abound. Social media and Internet-based technologies have the amazing potential to improve patient care and education. Multiple societies and organizations host Twitter chats on specific health subjects, providing a forum for real-time questions and answers. And indeed, this is not a one-sided billboard or megaphone. This is a two-way conversation and relationship. Social media is also being studied as a hospital quality improvement tool.3 Moving beyond tweets and status updates, text messaging is being studied as an instrument to improve medication adherence,4 smoking cessation,5 and modifications of cardiovascular risk factors.6 Mobile secure text messaging is now giving the clunky old pager a run for its money.7 Finally, we would be remiss to ignore the newest generation of clinicians—those who have really found their passion for medicine in the social media age. In a recent JGIM article, social media was seen as a professional tool that augmented the traditional medical school curriculum.8 Interestingly… Twitter provided value in two major domains: access and voice. Students gained access to information, to experts, to a variety of perspectives including patient and public perspectives, and to communities of support. They also gained a platform continued on page 2
SHARE
COMMENTARY continued from page 1
for advocacy, control of their digital footprint, and a sense of equalization within the medical hierarchy.
and groupies but students, patients, and each other. If you can’t keep up, you’re likely to be left behind. So let’s jump on the bandwagon! We hope that this issue of SGIM Forum empowers you to do so.
Intern Med 2016; 176(3):340-9. 5. Müssener U, Bendtsen M, Karlsson N, White IR, McCambridge J, Bendtsen P. Medicine has had its growing Effectiveness of short message pains in the era of modern commuservice text-based smoking nication and information exchange, cessation intervention among and certainly social media etiquette References university students: a randomized is at times a complex skillset. It is 1. BWW News Desk. Broadway’s clinical trial. JAMA Intern Med important to use discretion to avoid Hamilton hits one millions Tweets 2016; 176(3):321-8. public embarrassment or worse. in 2015! Available at: http://www. 6. Chow CK, Redfern J, Hillis GS, But let’s not throw the baby out broadwayworld.com/article/Broad Thakkar J, Santo K, Hackett ML, with the bath water. Participation in ways-HAMILTON-Hits-OneJan S, Graves N, de Keizer L, social media is not required to be a Million-Tweets-in-2015-20151222 Barry T, Bompoint S, Stepien S, good doctor. However, it is an avail(accessed on March 14, 2016). Whittaker R, Rodgers A, able and potentially powerful tool to 2. Kwame O, @MichelleObama: an Thiagalingam A. Effect of lifestyledeepen and enrich our professional exclusive look at how the first focused text messaging on risk experience as physicians and palady mastered social media, factor modification in patients tient educators as well as profesMarch 14, 2016. Available at: with coronary heart disease: a sional collaborators. To return to the http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/ randomized clinical trial. JAMA aforementioned article about Mrs. 14/11179572/first-lady-michelle2015; 314(12):1255-63. Obama, in it White House Chief obama-vr-interview-social-media7. Patel MS, Patel N, Small DS, Digital Officer Jason Goldman is pictures (accessed on March 14, Rosin R, Rohrbach JI, Stromberg quoted: “It took an entire decade 2016). N, Hanson CW, Asch DA. Change for people to understand that the In- 3. Lagu T, Goff SL, Craft B, in length of stay and ternet is fundamentally a platform Calcasola S, Benjamin EM, Priya readmissions among hospitalized of human conversation…it’s about A, Lindenauer PK. Can social medical patients after inpatient participating.” The Internet is not media be used as a hospital medicine service adoption of the solution to the time constraints quality improvement tool? J Hosp mobile secure text messaging. J of medical practice in the 21st cenMed 2016; 11(1):52-5. Gen Intern Med 2016; Mar 25 tury, but it is an adjunct. As those 4. Thakkar J, Kurup R, Laba TL, [Epub ahead of print]. outside the medical profession have Santo K, Thiagalingam A, 8. Chretien KC, Tuck MG, Simon M, done, let us in medicine aim to use Rodgers A, Woodward M, Singh LO, Kind T. A digital social media and Internet-based Redfern J, Chow CK. Mobile ethnography of medical students technologies to connect and to telephone text messaging for who use Twitter for professional communicate without barriers. Let medication adherence in chronic development. J Gen Intern Med SGIM us energize not necessarily fans disease: a meta-analysis. JAMA 2015; 30(11):1673-80.
SGIM FORUM 2016; 39(6)
2
