Reviewing social media use by clinicians

This a Paper discussed in Social Media Analysis 10-802 in Fall 2012.

Citation

M. Von Muhlen and L. Ohno-Machado, "Reviewing social media use by clinicians," Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, vol. 19, pp. 777-781, 2012.

Online version

Reviewing Social Media use by Clinicians

Summary

This is a review paper that focused on articles about clinician adoption of social media, both in their personal and professional lives. A PubMed database search was performed using terms like ‘social media’, ‘Facebook’, ‘Twitter’ and others to find articles published within the last few years. The literature search yielded 370 articles and the authors selected 50 to analyze in depth for this review paper.

Background and Methods

The studies were independently judged by both co-authors as well a scientific consultant. They followed the PRISMA guidelines in order to select the appropriate abstracts and articles. Selected articles were categorized into five topic areas:

• Overviews
• Adoption surveys
• Reference use
• Educational impact and use
• Professional conduct

These categories were the authors’ best attempt to subdivide the most relevant publications into mutually exclusive and exhaustive categories.

Results and Discussion

Overviews

Studies in this category seemed to promote awareness of proper social media use by medical professionals and caution against pitfalls. Terminology was not standardized such as the interchangeable use of social media, social network, social network service, and web 2.0. There is also a rapid evolution do the actual social media sources that are used during each given year. For example, the shift from MySpace back in the early 2000’s to Facebook and Twitter beginning around 2008-present. Wikipedia was also often overlooked as a social media site.

Adoption Surveys

Fifteen studies were identified in this category, with nearly all conducted online through an email recruitment process (one was conducted at a conference). The populations included medical students, pharmacy students, residents, plastic surgeons, pediatricians and others. The most common metric used was Facebook and more specifically referred to the responder as having a personal account.

Reference Use

Oddly enough, Wikipedia is highly used by clinicians as a source of reference materials, despite its frequent errors and open-editing nature. Hughes et al found that 70% of 35 junior physicians used Wikipedia to find medical information during a week-long period and 93% cited ease of use as a primary motivation. There were also multiple groups attempting to emulate Wikipedia’s crowdsourcing success to create an analogous medical web site. No successful site was reported as having thrived past an initial attempt.

Educational Impact and Use

As most people have come to realize and accept, social media presents new communication capabilities that may be leveraged to improve clinical education. This includes the incorporation of social media into medical school course curricula and clinical training programs such as internships and residency. Some support this new addition and others are skeptical to its ethical and educational implications. One positive example is the nonprofit web site called Student Doctor Network, which has 300,000 registered profiles and 1 million monthly views. The forums focus on clinical career topics and do not support detailed user profiles or ‘friending’ as the site encourages anonymity.

Professional Conduct

Breaching of patient confidentiality or publicizing unprofessional content is one of the main concern regarding social media use by clinicians. There have been suggestions to create mandatory social media training sessions to address this concern. Unfortunately, Kind et al reported that by the mid-2010, only 13 of the 132 US medical schools had explicit social media guidelines. There have also been focuses on patient-physician relationships using social networking by Guseh et al.

Conclusion

This is a very timely review article as there has been an increasing amount of emphasis placed on using social media and social networking to improve upon healthcare and the quality of care for patients. The authors do a great job at providing different examples of clinicians adopting social media and also take the time to caution the reader against some of the pitfalls.

The interest in this area of social media has increased as can be seen by the number of publications over the past few years: one in 2007, two in 2008, three in both 2009 and 2010 and six in the first half of 2011. Authors frequently emphasize a need for official guidelines to guide clinicians use of social media. Social media may become a critical part of healthcare, but this remains unproven and unclear. It will take several years to understand the effect of social media in clinician behavior and on patient outcomes.

Related papers

Some of the articles sited in the review study included:

• Medicine 2.0: social networking, collaboration, participation, apomediation and openness

• Wikipedia: a key tool for global public health promotion

• Seeking health information online: does Wikipedia matter?

• Integrating the hospital library with patient care, teaching and research: model and Web 2.0 tools to create a social and collaborative community of clinical research in a hospital setting

• Social medial policies at US medical schools

• Medical professionalism in the age of online social networking

Although there were many other interesting and related papers cited in this article, these provided additional information for some of the concepts discussed in this summary. Some of the concepts include: Medicine 2.0, Wikipedia used for clinicians education, and social networking (i.e.: Facebook).

Study Plan

As this was a review article, there were no analytically methods used aside from qualitative analysis. Articles were first filtered by a keyword search on Pubmed, then reviewed by an expert and finally selected based on agreement between reviewers. The PRISMA guidelines were used as much as possible. I was able to read through the article and understand the material discussed. I referred to the related papers listed above and a few others when I was interested in reading more detail.