Category: HCSM

Emergency physicians can be an ornery bunch, often opinionated and not afraid to speak out on a wide variety of issues. As emergency room (ER) overcrowding in Canada is seen as an early-warning signal for more wide-ranging problems within the health care system, having ER doctors who are willing to be vocal about their concerns is not necessarily a bad thing. (It’s worth noting that arguably the most high-profile media physician in Canada – Dr. Brian Goldman @NightShiftMD, host of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s White Coat Black Art is an ER doc).

Combining an ER physician with Twitter, as you can imagine, can be a potent mixture.

Nowhere…

So what’s a Twitter Chat?

Juliet Barbara, social media commentator for Forbes,  shares in her article “How Twitter Chats Will Open Your Mind and Network:”

…Twitter chats are Twitter-based dialogues that anyone can join just by following and mentioning whatever hashtag is assigned to that chat. Because of the diverse group of people a Twitter chat can bring together in an open, “liquid” environment, there’s potential for those serendipitous connections that just may complete an idea.

The Partnership with Patients Summit was an event focused on assuring the patient is at the center of healthcare policy, care and R&D. I was fortunate to attend, and while there met several patients and advocates who use Twitter chats to connect on disease and health. I learned quite a bit about why patients Twitter chat, and I couldn’t help but wonder if there’s not an opportunity for those involved in drug…

Today I’m running a workshop on #FOAMed with at AMEE 2013, along with my colleagues Annalisa Manca and Ellie Hothersall from Dundee and Laura-Jane Smith from UCL.  We’ll be giving a brief introduction to the growing movement of Free Open Access Medical Education #FOAMed.  We’ll be asking our participants to identify if if they are already using elements of FOAMed and how.  Annalisa is going to go over some of the educational theories that are at play in FOAMed and then Ellie and LJ will be demonstrating how they’ve adopted elements of FOAMed to support undergraduate teaching and in particular how they’ve used to Twitter to support teaching in public health and case-based discussions. We’ll also highlight some of the other FOAMed activities that are going a cross the continuum of education before we get our groups to look at how they might design a #FOAMed approach to some learning…

Social media tools are– or at least should be – fundamentally rewriting the rule book when it comes to boundary issues for physicians. As one pediatrician who is active on Twitter recently told me “There is only one me.”

While maintaining a distinct divide between professional and personal life has always been a central tenet of the rules and regulations that govern the medical profession (not dating your patients while in a doctor/patient relationship being the prime example), for those physicians using social media it is abundantly clear the issue is no longer clear-cut.

Nowhere has this situation been better stated  than in the recent viewpoint “Social Media and Physicians’ Online Identity Crisis” published in JAMA, Aug. 14 (v.310, no: 6, 581-582).

Authors Matthew DeCamp, Thomas Koenig and Margaret Chisolm (@whole_patients) confront the whole professional/personal divide directly and bluntly state attempting to have such a divide when using social media…