Social Media and Education in Hernia Repair
The International Hernia Collaboration (IHC) is currently a private vetted-membership Facebook™ group of surgeons, healthcare providers, and industry representatives who are passionately interested in the repair of hernia and optimizing outcomes. The firs
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Erin R. Bresnahan, Desmond T.K. Huynh, and Brian Jacob
48.1 Introduction The International Hernia Collaboration (IHC) is currently a private vetted-membership Facebook™ group of surgeons, healthcare providers, and industry representatives who are passionately interested in the repair of hernia and optimizing outcomes. The first 3 years have taught us clearly that by embracing closed Facebook™ groups as collaborative forums designed to provide quality improvement, we can more effectively and transparently obtain immediate global feedback that will improve both patient outcomes and the quality of care that surgeons provide to their patients. Groups like this one will help disrupt and evolve the current standards being used today to provide ongoing healthcare education and quality improvement.
48.2 Social Media: Background Social media can be defined as any online venue which allows communication amongst groups of individuals through the use of text, images, audio, video, or live broadcasting. Another name commonly used is “user generated content” (UGC), which on social media is easily created, disseminated, and accessed by members of the group. A 2014 study by the Pew Research Center showed that 74 % of all online adults used some social networking platform [1]. The most popular of these platforms is Facebook™, with 1.59 billion monthly active users [1]. The Facebook™ platform is continuously evolving, and adoption of Facebook™ “pages” has been used by businesses for years. In healthcare, the networking function of Facebook™ has already been employed by academic and private practices to connect with patients to augment consultation and collaboE.R. Bresnahan, B.A. • D.T.K. Huynh, B.A., B.S. B. Jacob, M.D. (*) Department of Surgery, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Mount Sinai Health System, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]
ration, aid in patient education, increase visibility of particular diseases, and publicize new research findings and best-practice guidelines [2]. Similarly, it has been harnessed by major medical journals to increase awareness of their publications. More recently, Facebook “groups,” which enable a community of users to privatize content, have been growing in popularity. Groups provide a number of features that facilitate discussion amongst members, ranging from the standard text, image, and video posts to group polls, file sharing, and sharing of events. Additionally, a group’s contents may be privatized by restricting access to the group; the content of these “closed” groups is accessible only by members who must first be approved by a group administrator. Facebook™ groups are an ideal forum for medical discussion because of these features and the fact that many physicians are already using the platform on a daily basis. Research on the use of Facebook™ groups for medical education has been mostly qualitative and focused on students’ or physicians’ perceptions, describing the patterns and modes of use, and onli
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