Background/Purpose:

Social media, now used by 79% of US
adults with internet access, has the potential to change the way in which
physicians, patients, and medical organizations communicate about
health-related issues. What remains unclear is to what extent physicians use
social media in their professional lives. The benefits of using social media
professionally include connecting physicians with common interests from
geographically disparate areas, collaborating on research projects, and
obtaining and sharing scientific information. It is assumed that younger
physicians are more involved in social media, although it is not known whether
this reflects personal or professional use.

To date, only a few small studies have
systematically assessed physicians’ professional use of social media. We
examined the use of social media for personal and professional purposes by
rheumatology fellows in North America.

Methods:

Rheumatology fellows attending the
2014 ACR Annual Meeting were invited to participate. After the
Fellows-In-Training educational session, Quick Response (QR) codes and web
links to an online survey were provided. The survey evaluated the educational
session and assessed use of and attitudes towards social media.

Results:

375 fellows attended the
Fellows-In-Training educational session, and 235 (62.7%) of these fellows
completed the survey. Year of training and specialty are shown in Table 1.
88.5% of fellows use social media for personal use, while 40.9% use it
professionally at least once monthly (Table 2).

Conclusion:

Facebook was the most commonly used
platform, with 82% of fellows using it for personal use. Twitter, for either
personal or professional use, was reported by 18% of fellows, significantly
less than surveys of adults with a college education, where the rates of use
are 30%.

For professional use, LinkedIn was the
most commonly used platform, utilized by 20% of rheumatology fellows. This is
less than in national studies, in which 50% of internet users with a college
education use LinkedIn.

It
is possible that warnings about potential harms of social media within
healthcare institutions have made rheumatology fellows less likely to engage on
these platforms. Future studies should examine the barriers to professional use
of social media, as well as educate physicians about its potential benefits.

Table
1: Level and type of training of rheumatology
fellows.

Table 2: Frequency of social network use by rheumatology fellows.