MedEd Talk: Social Media & Open resorces

Social medias role in Medical Education

In the interview Dr Chan explain how she uses social media herself as personal continuous medical education (CME). Both in her practice area and in the medical education field

It is a way to connect with other medical educators and get different perspectives on things. It works well for asynchronous contacts when you work shifts or are in different time zones as well as synchronous discussions when you don’t share the same physical place. It is a way to get the “Water cooler talk” to expand to have it on Twitter. She has cowritten an article with some tips for the novice and sceptic (Choo et al., 2015).

“It has opened my eyes up to different and varied practices both in medical education and emergency medicine.“

According to Dr Chan we see three forms of new scholars that exist now since social media (Chan et al., 2017):

• Critical clinicians – maybe not researchers themselves, but active and engage with science and get the scientists feedback on clinical implications. Good resource for sciences and can help
• Interactive investigator – scientists that are online to disseminate discuss their work. Engagement with
• Translational teachers – taking the latest studies and discuss it with peers and learners online on podcasts, blogs, chats.

You can read more about it in the article 28077195.

What transformative ideas has Web 2.0 brought to Medical Education?

Furthermore we discussed FOAM, Free Open Access Medical Education as a disruptive innovation in Medical Education FOAM (Twitter hashtag #FOAMed) For more information about what it is and how to use it read the blogpost by Cadogan: Creating the FOAMed Network and 24554447.

Disruptive innovation comes from Clayton Christensen’s work and can be described as “innovation that transforms a product or service that historically has been very complicated and expensive into something that is affordable and simple to use.” (“Clay Christensen on Disrupting Health Care,” 2009)

A recommended read: Harvard Business Review: A disruptive solution for healthcare (Christensen, 2011) and “What is a disruptive innovation” (Christensen, Raynor, & McDonald, 2015)

With all these resources, how do we assess quality of the resources we use in education?

Quality is a tricky thing and often in the eye of the beholder. We need to think about to educate our learners as well as ourselves to not only critique the primary resources as the scientific work, but also the secondary resources. We can now learn from how we critique online resources and bring that knowledge and frameworks to practice when we look at textbooks.

We need to educate our learners how to critique and look at different resources, no matter the sender. “Just because it looks like a New England Journal doesn’t mean it is.”

There is a lot of research that has been done and are still ongoing in The Metriq Study.

What would be our next steps?

Dr Chan mentioned a lot of different opportunities and challenges for Health care end Medical Education. We are already co-creating things with our learners, readers, participants and even patients. What is on in the frontline is how we can use gamification more, not only for learning as students but also as a patient. Furthermore we need to look at how we can be better at communicating with our patients. Some people have accessed a lot of material already, some of them has accessed contractional resources than you.

Good example of how to use digital media in your profession is how Dr Mike Evans have used videos to create information accessable for everyone.

Dr Teresa Chan

Dr Teresa Chan is an Assistant Professor at the Division of Emergency Medicine, Department of Medicine in McMaster University. She is an emergency physician, base hospital physician, and clinician educator in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Since 2014, she has also been the Director of Continuing Professional Development for the Division of Emergency Medicine. Nationally, she has held positions with the Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine as the journal’s inaugural Social Media Editor. Dr Chan is involved in several online educational resources as ALiEM (Academic Life in Medical Education), CanadiEM and International Clinician Educator’s blog.