JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The COVID-19 pandemic has catapulted virtual online learning to the forefront of medical education as training programs adapt to physical distancing challenges while maintaining the rigorous standards of medical training. SoMe offers a unique and partially untapped potential to supplement formal medical education.

Objective:

We detail a summary of the incentives, applications, challenges, and pitfalls of SoMe based medical education for both trainees and educators

Methods:

We performed a literature review via PubMed on medical research involving social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Papers were reviewed for inclusion based on the integrity and power of the study.

Results:

The unique characteristics of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and WhatsApp endow them with unique communication capabilities that serve different educational purposes in both the formal and informal education setting. However contemporary medical education curricula lack widespread guidance on meaningful use, application and deployment of social media in medical education.

Conclusions:

Clinicians and institutions must evolve to embrace the use of SoMe platforms for medical education. Healthcare professionals can approach SoMe engagement in the same ethical manner that they would with patients in real life but healthcare institutions ultimately must enable their healthcare professionals to do so by enacting realistic social media policies. Institutions should appoint clinicians with strong social media experience to leadership roles in order to spearhead these generational and cultural changes. Further studies are needed to better understand how healthcare professionals can best utilize social media as educational tools most effectively. Ultimately social media is here to stay influencing lay public knowledge and trainee knowledge. Clinicians and institutions must embrace this complementary modality of trainee education and champion social media as a novel distribution platform that can also help propagate truth in a time of misinformation.