Social Media and Pediatric Hospital Medicine: How Our Discipline Benefits From a Virtual Community and Why It Matters for Our Future

Social media, defined as Internet-based applications that support the collaborative creation and exchange of user-generated content,1 is now part of our culture. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Doximity, blogs, and wikis are pervasive means of communication and information dissemination in our society. For physicians, this transparent way of communicating affects patient expectations, engagement, and education.2,3 Whether these methods are being used to network professionally, advocate for public health, or to provide patient outreach and education, physician use and awareness of social media influence their clinical practice and professional engagement. At the Pediatric Hospital Medicine (PHM) conference in 2012, the planning committee and conference attendees dedicated resources to social media. The primary objective for the use of Facebook was to publicize conference events and content. The primary objective for the use of Twitter was to increase conference participants’ engagement and satisfaction, as well as reach a larger audience on topics pertinent to PHM. At the PHM conference in 2013, social media faculty again supported Twitter and Facebook activity. In addition, the conference hashtag (#PHM2013) was registered with the Symplur (Upland, CA) Healthcare Hashtags Project (http://www.symplur.com/healthcare-hashtags/). Between 2012 and 2013, participants using social media on both platforms increased (Fig 1). The overall number of impressions for Tweets tagged #PHM2013 was 903 797, nearly 10 times higher than the smaller sampling of #PHM2012 the previous year. FIGURE 1 Social media activity on Facebook and Twitter for PHM conferences. Objectives in 2012, the first year of a dedicated social media presence at the PHM conference, were to enhance conference attendees’ experiences and to share the ideas at PHM with an audience beyond the actual conference attendees. Given the positive qualitative responses by those participating actively in social media platforms and the fact that …