I'm giving this presentation at the American Society for Radiation Oncology today.

1. Social Media and Medicine
October 31, 2010
Matthew Katz, MD
aka @subatomicdoc

2. Happy Halloween!
Dana, Ben, Jake and Hayley Katz
via amyvernon.tumblr.com

3. Disclosures
• Financial: None
• ASTRO: Incoming Chair of Communications
• Intellectual: Founder, CaP Calculator website
• My opinions are my own, not that of ASTRO or
any organization

4. Social Media
• What is it?
– Background
– Classification
• Reasons to Participate
– Logical
– Practical
• Social Media and Cancer Care
– Education/Research/Patient Care
• Barriers to Participation
• Summary

5. What is Social Media?
Differs from Traditional/Industrial Media:
• Global reach
• Means of production available to anyone at little/no cost
• No specialized training require to create media
• Content more rapidly updated online
• Less permanent – your work can be changed/improved
from the original
Source: Wikipedia, 10/2/2010

6. What has changed in the last ten years?
Web 1.0 Web 2.0
Information Participation
Consumer Spectrum
One Way Interactive
Static Dynamic
Published Published &
User-Generated

7. Precursors to Social Media
• Bulletin Boards / forums
• Amazon.com  product review from readers
• Ebay  do-it-yourself community of buyers/
sellers

8. Types of Social Media
Type Example Purpose Comments
Blog Huffington Post Communicate 122 M blogs
Microblogging Twitter Communicate,
market
27 M tweets/day
Wiki Wikipedia Collaborate >2B articles on
Wikipedia alone
Content Sharing YouTube, Flickr Share, comment,
market
Flickr: 5B images
YouTube: 2 B
views/day
Folksonomies Technorati, Del.icio.us Categorize
Social Networks Facebook Facebook: 500 M
users

10. Societal Change via Social Tools
• Costs of sharing information have
plummeted
• Permits loose formation of groups for
– sharing
– cooperating
– social action
• Online communities can be created based on
interest, not geography or economics
Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky (2009)

11. The New World 1.0

12. The New World 2.0

13. Social Networks in Medicine

14. Professional Society Networks

15. Why Participate in Social Media?
• Maintain or create relationships
• Succumb to social pressure from friends
• Altruistic impulse
• Prurient impulse
• Creative impulse
• Validation impulse
• Affinity impulse
Groundswell, Li & Bernoff (2008)

16. Medicine is a Social Science

17. Radiation Oncology is a Social Science

18. Practical Reasons to Participate
• Professional
– Medical training
– Patient education
– Reputation management
– Recruiting
• Clinical Care
– Improve support network for patients
– Enhance MD-patient communication
– Improve quality and safety
• Research
– Collaboration / Crowdsourcing
– Promote research findings
• Society
– Advocacy and public policy

19. So why get involved in social media?
• Values and purpose of radiation oncology
haven’t changed
• Relieve suffering
• Improve quality
• Improve safety
• But new strategies may be necessary to
achieve our goals in cancer care
• Technology should enhance direct patient care, not
replace it

20. How do you want to participate?

21. Social Media in Radiation Oncology
• Education
• Career
• Research
• Patient Care
• Public Policy

22. Education - Wikibook
• Started 2004
• 1441 pages, 34 sections/chapters
• 34 registered users
• >90% of content by Brian Cook and Tomas Dvorak

23. Career
• ASTRO Career Center
• LinkedIn
• sdn network
• Facebook

24. Residency Programs and Employers:
What are they saying about you?
* 274 comments, >97K page views by 10/1/2010
* Longer string commenting on residency interview experiences

25. What about your reputation?

26. Research Collaboration
• Website facilitating shared decision-making in
clinically localized prostate cancer
• Aggregates nomograms, other predictive tools
• Collaboration with MGH, DFCI, BIDMC, UCSF,
MSKCC, Cleveland Clinic
• > 800 users globally
• Online nomogram for breast
recurrence +/- RT after lumpectomy
• Similar format to Adjuvant! Online
• Validated
Katz et al, BJUI 2010
Sanghani et al, JCO 2010

27. Why not crowdsource clinical trials?
• Why not wikify to improve clinical trial
accrual?
– Community clinicians
• Advocates for enrollment
– E-Patients
• Can make it easier to understand, more organized
– Allied Health Professionals
• Improve quality through multidisciplinary views
– Industry
• Funding/collaboration opportunities
– Public Policy
• Ensure legal/regulatory compliance to current standards

28. Share your research findings
• Social Networks
• Blogs
• Microblogging
Know your audience!

29. Patient Care
• Forums
• Social Networks
• Blogs

30. Society - Public Policy

31. Don’t let them get it wrong

33. When you share and care about
others…

34. Barriers to Participation
Logistic
• Lack of Familiarity
• Time
• Financial Cost
Risks
• Reputation (personal or organizational)
• Balancing privacy and transparency
• Malpractice liability

36. These too shall pass
• Mayo Clinic has established a Center for
Social Media
• Other healthcare organizations and
providers are also learning to navigate in
social media
• It’s a matter of how social media becomes
part of medicine, not if it will

37. Where to Start: Person or Organization
POST Approach:
• People: what are people ready for
• Objectives: what are your objectives?
• Strategy: How to you want to change your
relationships?
• Technology: What social media tools help you
achieve your strategic goals?
Groundswell, Li & Bernoff (2008)

38. What are your needs?

39. Resources - Guidelines
• http://socialmediagovernance.com/policies.p
hp?f=4
• http://www.cdc.gov/healthcommunication/T
oolsTemplates/socialmediatoolkit_BM.pdf
• www.osma.org/socialmediapolicy/
• http://www.foxepractice.com/healthcare-
social-media-policy

40. Summary
• Social media is rapidly changing
relationships in medicine whether you like it
or not
• Like medicine, social media is an art to
practice, not master
• It’s not what you know, but how you share it
that determines value in both social media
and medicine

42. Acknowledgements
Radiation Oncology
• Anthony Zietman
• Phillip Devlin
• Beth Bukata, Katherine Bennett
• ASTRO
Social Media
• Diggers
• #hcsm #md_chat #hpm #billofrights
and other tweeps on Twitter