Social Media for Higher Education

This post describes and provides examples of three social media platforms used as a pedagogical tool to create meaningful learning assignments in face-to-face and online courses. Social media platf...

The social media tool Twitter can help students in their research and students can use these tips to effectively conduct research and write papers.

Imagine you’re at a friend’s party in your neighbourhood. You recognise a few of your patients. As you join the conversation you continuously blurt out phrases like: “Make sure you vaccinate your kids,” “Our practice has opened a skin clinic; it is important to get an annual skin check,” and “Here’s a copy of our latest newsletter.” When one of your patients tries to start a friendly conversation you say: “Sorry, I don’t befriend patients,” and you walk away to chat with a colleague.

You would make a complete fool of yourself.

Still, that’s how many health practitioners behave online. We often use our professional websites and social media accounts as promotional channels and we’re told not to accept patient friend requests on Facebook. When receiving positive feedback from our patients we have to be careful not to share or re-tweet it as this could be interpreted as a patient testimonial by AHPRA.

It’s awkward.

At the same time there is an unstoppable digital patient movement happening. Health consumers are getting smarter and better organised. The ePatient is empowered by digital technology and social networks. Their disease-specific knowledge matches that of health practitioners – and is often superior. Powerful peer-to-peer networks help consumers to make better decisions about their health care.

And this is only the beginning.

Ignoring digital technologies is not going to help. This will create a digital divide between consumers and health care services. We have to find a way to accommodate participatory healthcare. I don’t believe this means that health consumers should e.g. have the ability to remove or hide information from their electronic health records – but if they want they should be given access and, together with clinicians, take responsibility for their care and the quality of their healthcare data.

We must get over our social media fear so we can start to listen to health consumers online and take part in discussions.

We’re trained to deliver care in the one-on-one situation, but in the near future health practitioners will also engage with online communities. An attitude change towards digital technologies is needed. E-health should improve the interaction between clinicians and consumers. This requires their input at all levels of development.

And, instead of warning students and clinicians about the dangers of social media, they need to be trained to integrate these networks in their day-to-day work.

Figure 1, the photo and information sharing service for the medical profession, is taking the next step in its evolution to become an image-based social network for physicians.

Yesterday the company quietly launched a new version of its photo and information sharing service, which gives users the ability to create more robust profiles of themselves and create groups around institutions or interests.

The updates to the app reflect a huge increase in user adoption since the company launched a bit more than a year ago. Currently there are roughly 3.5 medical images viewed per second on the site, Levey says. And earlier this week the company hit roughly 50 million images viewed.

Toronto-based Figure 1 is akin to Instagram but for doctors. The company’s founders take great pains to ensure that there is no identifying information about patients that appears on the photo sharing app. Rather the idea is for doctors to share interesting cases among themselves.

Figure 1 was born out of concerns company co-founder Dr. Joshua Landy had when looking at how doctors and medical students were using smart phones in hospitals and research universities. What the group found was that physicians and students were using social media to share information about patients and were doing it in a way that didn’t protect the patient’s privacy or store the records in a meaningful and secure way.

“Tens of thousands of times a day patient records and educational images are transferred from healthcare provider to healthcare provider,” Dr. Landy says. “We were thinking of a way to try and preserve and protect that information in an archive that’s searchable and useful.”

The co-founders: Landy, Gregory Levey and Richard Penner, launched the app in May 2013 and it’s now available on both iOS and Android platforms.

For doctors, it’s a way to share knowledge virtually with other physicians around the globe. A simple photo and a comment about a unique case can lead to collaboration and the creation of new bodies of knowledge with doctors worlds away, Dr. Landy says.

“We really have two valuable things,” says Levey. “We are concentrating on the product and growth and moving a little bit from educational information to more practical ways we can be used by care groups and other professional organizations.

The app already has drawn users from over 10% of all of the medical school students in the U.S. “If you look at the app, it’s great from an education point of view. Now we’re pushing for care groups, different medical practices and hospitals to adopt it and that’s where it will have real utility.”

With the new release, users have the ability to follow cases, and collaborate with doctors around the world. The newest iteration of the Figure 1 product also includes more robust biographies, taking the app from anonymous messaging to a more robust social networking function, Levey says. Doctors log in to the service through an API with physician-focused networking service, Doximity.

Ultimately, the company sees itself as part of a group of new applications like Doximity and HealthTap, which are bringing the social networking tools for consumers and adding the features that medical professionals may need to do their jobs better.

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BACKGROUND:
The provision of excellent patient care is a goal shared by all doctors. The role of social media (SM) in helping medical students and doctors achieve clinical excellence is unknown. Social media may help facilitate the achievement of clinical excellence

PURPOSE:
This report aimed to identify examples of how SM may be used to help promote the achievement of clinical excellence in medical learners.

METHODS:
Three of the authors previously conducted a systematic review of the published literature on SM use in undergraduate, graduate and continuing medical education. Two authors re-examined the 14 evaluative studies to identify any examples of SM use that may facilitate the achievement of clinical excellence and to consider whether there were any aspects of clinical excellence for which no studies had been performed, and, if so, whether SM was relevant to these domains.

RESULTS:
Each study touched on one or more of the following domains of clinical excellence: communication and interpersonal skills; professionalism and humanism; knowledge; diagnostic acumen; exhibiting a passion for patient care; a scholarly approach to clinical practice; and explicitly modelling expertise to medical trainees. No study addressed the role of SM to promote the skillful negotiation of the health care system, and in collaboration with investigators to advance science and discovery; however, additional evidence suggested that SM may play an adjunctive role in promoting the achievement of these aspects of clinical excellence.

CONCLUSION:
This report supports the hypothesis that SM may help facilitate the achievement of clinical excellence; however, further research is needed into the role of SM in promoting the achievement of clinical excellence.