Social Media and Medical Education in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Scoping Review (Preprint)

Abstract

BACKGROUND The COVID-19 pandemic has brought virtual web-based learning to the forefront of medical education as training programs adapt to physical distancing challenges while maintaining the rigorous standards of medical training. Social media has unique and partially untapped potential to supplement formal medical education. OBJECTIVE The aim of this review is to provide a summary of the incentives, applications, challenges, and pitfalls of social media–based medical education for both trainees and educators. METHODS We performed a literature review via PubMed of medical research involving social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, and podcasts. Papers were reviewed for inclusion based on the integrity and power of the study. RESULTS The unique characteristics of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, and podcasts endow them with unique communication capabilities that serve different educational purposes in both formal and informal education settings. 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 social media platforms for medical education. Health care professionals can approach social media engagement in the same ethical manner that they would with patients in person; however, health care institutions ultimately must enable their health care professionals to achieve this by enacting realistic social media policies. Institutions should appoint clinicians with strong social media experience to leadership roles to spearhead these generational and cultural changes. Further studies are needed to better understand how health care professionals can most effectively use social media platforms as educational tools. 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, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

“MedEd” on Twitter: A Social Network Analysis

“…Healthcare professionals can handle social media encounters on the same moral grounds that they would with patients in person. However, healthcare organizations eventually must allow medical professionals to promote this by redefining realistic social media policies and privacy issues [8].…”

“…This can encourage medical students to participate and engage with the material, leading to a deeper understanding of the subject matter [7]. Overall, social media analysis, specifically Twitter, can be a powerful tool for enhancing engagement and learning in medical education [8,9]. By facilitating communication, sharing resources, encouraging participation, networking, and tracking trends, educators can help students stay engaged and up to date on the latest trends and research in the field [10].…”