I set up this independent blog a few weeks ago as there was a queue to post on the Johns Hopkins Reflections on Clinical Excellence blog http://clinical-excellence.blogspot.com/ and I wanted a more timely way to get my thoughts into the blogosphere. The Hopkins blog was created by the Miller-Coulson Academy at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center to serve as a forum for discussion about clinical excellence. Since I’m the only psychiatrist member of the Academy, I sometimes contribute reflections relevant to psychiatry, but I also have a strong interest in professionalism and humanism (one of the domains of clinical excellence as defined by the Academy) and so I contribute reflections on these topics as well.
This is my first post on this blog, which is still under construction.
I initially launched my twitter account http://twitter.com/whole_patients solely as a way of enhancing the visibility of the Hopkins blog. However, I quickly saw twitter’s potential beyond being a signpost directing readers to the blog. (Since then, I’ve started another twitter account http://twitter.com/psychpearls that delivers daily tweets of clinical pearls to psychiatry trainees.) Twitter introduced me to the ASME workshop, which I’m able to attend with the support of the Miller-Coulson Academy and a gift fund. Twitter also gave me access to an international network of medical educators interested in the use of social media and an array of innovative projects like the #meded chats and twitter journal club. More locally, via twitter, I met a Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics faculty member who has organized a University-wide social media work group. This group is creating the first Hopkins social media seminar series and is also developing some cutting-edge social media research. Twitter also introduced me to the potential of social media to promote humanistic values in medicine. To this end, as part of a longitudinal curriculum development course, I’m partnering with a Hopkins General Internal Medicine fellow to develop a social media curriculum for the medical school. The aim of our proposed course is to foster humanism over the course of medical education and develop students’ knowledge and skills around the professional use of social media.
My short-term goals for attending the ASME workshop are to further my social media knowledge and skills, and to meet an international group of medical educators with similar interests. During the next year, I hope to give several US talks on the utility of social media for psychiatry and internal medicine clinician-educators, for medical students, and for an international women’s addiction research group (of which I’m a member*). I’m also developing a Hopkins-based educational research project related to the proposed social media curriculum.
My long-term goals for attending the workshop are to develop international educational research collaborations around the use of social media in medical education, specifically as it pertains to humanism and professionalism.
*For anyone interested, this personal commentary describes my switch from a community-based clinician to an academic researcher: Transitioning to Academic Psychiatry While Maintaining Balance: Working Smarter, Not Harder, Chisolm, Acad Psychiatry 2011: 35: 165-167
link to meded connect: http://mededconnect.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/looking-forward-to-asme11/
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