Background/Purpose: Twitter is an increasingly popular platform for discussion and engagement amongst healthcare professionals. Here we describe the development, implementation and analysis of a rheumatology focused journal club on Twitter which utilizes the hashtag #RheumJC.

Methods: A #RheumJC development team was created, consisting of two academic rheumatologists, two private practice rheumatologists, and an adult/peds rheumatology Fellow in Training (FIT). A needs assessment survey was conducted to gauge interest and help define the structure of the proposed journal club, including preferred times and types of articles to be discussed. Prior to journal club sessions, requests were made for temporary open-access privileges to the article as well as invites to principal authors to participate. A total of 4 different journal clubs were conducted between January 29^th and May 2^nd, 2015, each consisting of two “live” one hour chats, occurring during the evening hours of GMT (European centric) and EST (Americas centric) respectively, as well as a full 24 hrs to allow for asynchronous participation. An analysis of the different sessions was performed to assess participant demographics and participation rates. A qualitative content analysis of the entire 96 hours of transcript (1927 tweets) was conducted with 6 coders assessing 363 tweets each (313 unique and 50 common). Inter-rater agreement was calculated using Krippendorff’s alpha. A second survey was conducted after the 4^th journal club to assess participant satisfaction and identify additional strengths or barriers.

Results: In total, 133 individuals from 31 different countries participated in at least one #RheumJC session. While the majority of participants were rheumatologists, over 8 different medical fields were represented. There were 13 FIT and other trainees amongst the participants. 38 individuals participated in at least 2 different journal clubs, 16 participated in at least 3, and 8 individuals were present at all four. The mean number of tweets during each of the live journal clubs sessions (n=8) was 197 (166 unique tweets, 31 re-tweets). For 2 of the journal clubs, principal authors of the manuscript were able to participate. A qualitative content analysis (inter-rater agreement alpha =0.801) revealed that the majority of the conversation was relevant with 28% of the tweets addressing the article directly (in the spirit of a “traditional” journal club) and another 62% considered “on-topic” with tweets referencing personal experiences, opinions, and links to supporting literature. A survey conducted after the 4^thjournal club revealed that the majority (89%) of those who had participated were either satisfied or very satisfied with the #RheumJC initiative. Of interest, 11% of journal club participants indicated they had joined Twitter solely because of #RheumJC, and another 37% stated that #RheumJC had increased their use of Twitter as a tool for medical education.

Conclusion: #RheumJC is a novel and popular approach to the traditional medical journal club which brings together people from around the globe and across specialties to discuss current medical literature in rheumatology utilizing Twitter as a medium for medical education.

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ACR Meeting Abstracts - https://acrabstracts.org/abstract/rheumjc-development-implementation-and-analysis-of-an-international-twitter-based-rheumatology-journal-club/