I Joined Twitter to Teach

I joined Twitter to teach. In May 2016, I started tweeting “questions of the day” for my inpatient hospital medicine team at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital from @RJmdphilly. #GreenQOD (“Green” is our teaching service, and “QOD” for question of the day) was born in the days of only 140 characters per tweet (now expanded to 280), which placed a potentially daunting onus on brevity in phrasing—and answering—clinical questions. My inaugural question? “What’s the real story with beta blockers in reactive airway disease? If increase risk is real, how do you balance risk/benefit?” Rules of the game? I would tweet a question in the afternoon; my trainees would have until rounds the next morning to investigate the question and tweet a response back. We’d spend the first 10 minutes of rounds discussing what they found.  In that first week, we covered Bayesian reasoning and C. diff assays, interpreting coronary CT scans, high-value utilization of inpatient physical therapy consults, late complications of gastric bypass, and climate change’s effect on tick-born illness. We also investigated the mechanism of heliotrope cyanosis observed in the 1918 influenza pandemic and learned about one of our patient’s days of civil disobedience with Dorothy Day. But how did this idea originate, and were we achieving any of my goals? #GreenQOD was born from a feeling of stagnation regarding inpatient teaching. As an enthusiastic early-career ...
Source: Academic Medicine Blog - Category: Universities & Medical Training Authors: Tags: Featured Guest Perspective social media teaching Twitter Source Type: blogs