In a Research Letter in JAMA, Dr. Chretien et al describe the profile of physicians in the Twitter universe, specifically focusing on professionalism.
Inclusion criteria:
- Self identified physician
- At least 500 followers during May 1-31, 2010 (Whew, I only have 309 followers.)
- English tweets
- Posted a tweet within last 6 months
A total of 260 physicians were studied.
- 6.2% were from Emergency Medicine.
- 15% (most) were from Surgery and its subspecialties.
- 76% were from the United States.
Three physicians independently coded the 20 most recent tweets from each account (total n= 5,156) for unprofessional content. There were 144 (3%) unprofessional tweets from 27 users:
- 55 (1%) - possible conflict of interest, advocating for non-standard therapies
- 38 (0.7%) - potentially violation of patient privacy
- 33 (0.6%) - profanity
- 14 (0.3%) - sexually explicit material
- 4 (0.1%) - discriminatory statement
- 25 of 27 (92%) of users were identifiable
Take a look at your most recent tweets. How would they have performed if you were included in this study?
Reference
Chretien KC, Azar J, Kind T. Physicians on Twitter. JAMA: The journal of the American Medical Association. 2011. 305(6), 566-8. PMID: 21304081
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I see a lot of the same trends on the blogosphere as well. Surprisingly, I've gotten a lot of mixed feed back from people when trying to address this and raise awareness (see http://erjedi.blogspot.com/2011/01/fine-line.html)
ReplyDeleteI think social media use by us in the medical field is something we need to be very careful with, and when we see colleagues acting inappropriately, we need to say something about it. By in large, its mostly good people having a bad moment when these sort of things are posted and shared online, but you can't begin to address a problem until you are aware that a problem even exists. Hopefully this article will make at least a dent in the problem. Thanks for sharing it.
@Threehills: I actually read your post when you commented on another blogger's borderline post. I agree with you -- that probably stepped over the line in terms of patient confidentiality. The details were too specific and, if ever identifiable, would be really embarrassing to the patient. While I do enjoy the freedom to blog, we in the medical profession should indeed self-filter before an external regulator does it for us.
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