Social media platforms available today
Facebook is the most well-known and used. Within the medical community, it has also been widely adopted by institutions and physicians to be in contact with patients. It is recommended to build a professional Facebook page to avoid unwanted contact with your personal accounts.
Instagram is a popular image sharing platform. Instagram allows photographs and short videos to be shared. All posts must contain either an image or a video, making the platform well suited to radiologists to share their cases within the radiology community.
LinkedIn provides a platform for sharing professional accomplishments. It also serves as a messaging service. However, the interactive aspect of LinkedIn is quite limited when compared with Facebook or Twitter.
Figure1 is an image sharing platform for health care workers with a similar format to Instagram. Although it presents a strictely educational purpose, its networking character is less developed.
Fig. 1: Social media platforms that can be of value for radiologists. Each platform has inherent advantages and drawbacks that should be taken into consideration when developing and delivering educational content.
References: Larissa Defendi
How are radiologists using Social Media?
- To build a network of international professional connections;
- Knowledge sharing;
- To find interactive material for educational purposes;
- To be in closer contact with radiological professional organisations and scientific societies.
How it could be used?
- Raise public awareness regarding the role of the specialty in patient care;
- To aggregate rare cases and identify research collaborators from aorund the world.
Concerns and challenges of professional social media use
Ethical issues and patient privacy:
- Once a content is in social media, it becomes widely available, contrary to case reports in scientific journals, that could be assessed only by their subscribers.
- Images should be careful anonymized and patient geographic information should be hided. The rarer a case, the less information should be provided to avoid identification.
Medical reports and online peers consultations:
- Although social media allows intense knowledge exchange between experts, the report should not include the names of random people that helped to solve the case online.
Fig. 2: Ethical check-points in safe twitting. Social media posts are clearly similar to case reports and do not by themselves qualify as research. Organizations and academic institutions might have their own policies or guidelines for posting cases to social media outlets – individuals must be aware of them.
References: Larissa Defendi
What about peer-reviewing?
SoMe provides a different type of peer-reviewing. While the traditional method is anonymous and slow, in SoMe the specialist community provides immediate feedback once a case is posted. All comments are visible to the public. Users can read the entire discussion and decide what can be legitimate.
On the other hand, the review does not happen before a case is posted. Although recommended, not all tweets whose validity is questioned are removed.
Start tweetting right now!
A guide on the most popular platform for knowledge exchange
Is your account for professional purposes?
- Place ",MD" after your name;
- Your profile photo should be chosen accordingly
Get familiarized with the hashtag ontology:
There is a collection of hashtags / standar lexicon that helps to organize the Twitter content and make it searchable.
Who to follow:
- Twitter has some statistics regarding their most influentional profiles.
- Tagging these profiles to your tweets may turn your comntent more visible, especially when it is retweeted by the influencers.
The more a post is seen and engaged with (liked, shares, retweeted, reposted, and commented on), the more likely it will appear in a new user’s feed.
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Fig. 3: Analytics, Top 5 influencers and #Hashtag Ontology: Analytics can be obtained for the last 30 days through a multitude of tools. Numbers vary considerably near scientific meetings. Who to follow: if you are new on Twitter, try following the top 5 influencers. By mentions are the most cited users. By tweet are the ones that publish the most with the cited hashtag. The #Hashtag Ontology is a standard lexicon proposed for radiology tweets in order to make them more traceable for radiologists.
References: Larissa Defendi
The anatomy of a Tweet
A systematic approach can make your case more interesting and enhance its educational potential. Here are some models from influentional profiles in radiology.
Fig. 4: The anatomy of a well designed educational Tweet. A: Knowing the meaning of each tweet symbol. B: Peers interaction: feedback and reviews on a challenge case.
References: Larissa Defendi
Live twitting during a meeting
During the 2016 and 2017 annual meetings of the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology (USCAP), live tweeting from participants made the event reach an audience 10 times greater than the actual attendees. When allowed, main topics of expert lectures were made available via social media and thoroughly debated by people that could not attend the meeting.
Use of native Twitter surveys to reinforce the need of a subspecialist evaluation in controversial cases
Examples from daily pathology practice, with controversies in replicability of nomenclature and grading were employed in a pool. The primary aim was to evaluate Twitter as a tool to assess controversial points and improve Pathology practice.
Two independent polls were made publicly available for one to five days each. Both polls employed a borderline situation in diagnosing and grading gastrointestinal pathology specimens that may also be encountered by general pathologists and specialists.
Voting options were scored in a Likert-like scale with four options; varying from low grade (LG), moderate grade, high grade dysplasia and “in situ” adenocarcinoma. Brief clinical data, four representative microscopy images and a #GIPath hashtag were also available.
Fig. 5: A poll was made public and employed a borderline situation in diagnosing and grading a gastrointestinal pathology specimen that may be encountered by general pathologists. Both general and gastrointestinal pathologists voted in the survey. B: The results were lately published and showed that voters’ tendency was to elect low grade dysplasia as frequently as moderate and high grade dysplasia grouped (“as close as flipping a coin”), reinforcing the need of a specialist when addressing treacherous cases.
References: Marcelo Balancin