Background
- Social media has become a major source of communication in medicine. We aimed to understand the relationship between physicians' social media influence and their scholarly and clinical activity.
Methods
- We identified attending, US electrophysiologists on Twitter. We compared physician Twitter activity to (a) scholarly publication record (h-index) and (b) clinical volume according to CMS. The ratio of observed vs. expected Twitter followers (obs/exp) was calculated based on each scholarly (K-index) and clinical activity.
Results
- We identified 284 physicians, with mean Twitter age of 5.0 (SD 3.1) years and median 568 followers (25
th
, 75
th
: 195, 1146). They had a median 34.5 peer-reviewed papers (25
th
, 75
th
: 14, 105), 401 citations (25
th
, 75
th
: 102, 1677), and h-index 9 (25
th
, 75
th
: 4, 19.8). The median K-index was 0.4 (25
th
, 75
th
: 0.15, 1.0), ranging 0.0008 - 29.2. The median EP procedures was 77 (25
th
, 75
th
: 0, 160) and E&M visits 264 (25
th
, 75
th
: 59, 516) in 2017. The top 1% electrophysiologists for followers accounted for 20% of all followers, 17% of status updates, had a mean h-index of 6 (vs. 15 for others, p=0.3), and accounted for 1% of procedural and E&M volumes. They had a mean K-index of 21 (vs. 0.77 for others, p<0.0001), and clinical obs/exp follower ratio of 17.9 and 18.1 for procedures and E&M (p<0.001 each, vs. others [0.81 for each]).
Conclusions
- Electrophysiologists are active on Twitter, with modest influence often representative of scholarly and clinical activity. However, the most influential physicians appear to have relatively modest scholarly and clinical activity.