Web 2.0 for Emergency Physicians

Web 1.0 versus Web 2.0

Why use Web 2.0?

Emergency physicians, and doctors, in general, are constantly communicating with one another about medicine whether formally (journals, conferences, meetings, CME sessions, etc) or informally (on the floor, during breaks, online, at home, etc). Because of this, Web 2.0, which epitomizes constant communication, is a natural tool for doctors to use.

According to Pat Croskerry, the environment that emergency physicians work in is a ‘Perfect Storm” for medical error. We work in a time-critical, information limited, pressure cooker environment. To thrive and survive we need to constantly maintain and grow our foreground knowledge (used for ‘flesh and blood’ decision making to care for our patients and solve clinical problems) as well as our background knowledge (the core content and basic sciences that we need to understand the language of medicine, to teach, and to pass exams).

We need to know a lot, we need to know it now, and often we don’t know what we need to know until we need to know it… Where can we turn?

Web 2.0 of course — you don’t want to be stuck using old textbooks chained to the desk for the rest of your career do you?

What can Web 2.0 be used for?

Emergency Physicians can use Web 2.0 for:

• Searching and sourcing information
• Sorting, saving and storing information
• Staying up-to-date
• Sharing information
• Social networking

Do you use Web 2.0 for clinical decision making?

What are Web 2.0 Resources?

There are a diverse range of Web 2.0 resources relevant to Emergency Physicians and which can impact on our daily practice.

These include:

• Blogs
• Blogs Rankings and Rounds — When is a blog not a blog? — Emergency medicine blog database
• Microblogging tools
  Medical Twitter — Blogs Rankings and Rounds
• Podcasts
  Podcasts for Emergency Physicians — Podcast Database
• Feeds and Aggregators
• RSS feed Really Simple Syndication — Health Feed Aggregation
• Social bookmarking
  Social Bookmarking for Physicians
• Social networking
  Physician Social and Professional Networks — Australian Hospital Social Network list — Is Social Media the Rock’n’Roll of HealthCare?
• Wikis
  such as OzEMedicine
• Alternative search engines
  Medical Search for Physicians
  Search engine reviews:
  Mednar the Health Search Solution — GoPubMed — Hakia PubMed Semantic Search — Search Medica Search — Customize Medical Search with Science Roll — Health Sciences Online — Yottlalook — Dr Socrates — Healthmash and Webicina — Health Professional Search — Top Bedside Health Search Engines 2008.

Won’t all this lead to information overload?

Not if you use it right, in fact Web 2.0 tools can help save you from information overload.

Further reading

• Clinical Cases and images blog (@vesd) — Web 2.0 in Medicine — Tim O’Reilly Defines Web 2.0 — Web 2.0 in Medicine: You Only See What You Know — A Presentation on Web 2.0 in Health Care by John Sharp
• DavidRothman.net (@davidlrothman) — List of medical wikis
• Dr Shock (@drshock) — How and Why Junior Physicians use Web 2.0
• Frontier Psychiatrist — Evidence based mental health and Web 2.0
• How Stuff Works — How Web 2.0 Works —How Web 3.0 Will Work
• Medicine 2.0 Blog Carnival
• ScienceRoll (@berci) — Medicine 2.0
• Tim O’Reilly — What Is Web 2.0
• Webicina — Medicine in Second Life — How to keep yourself up-to-date in medicine

From the ‘mainstream’ published literature:

• Berger E. Web 2.0 in Emergency Medicine: Specialty Embracing the Future of Medical Communication. Ann Emerg Med. 2012 Apr;59(4)A21-23 [fulltext]
• Berger E. This sentence would easily fit onto Twitter: Emergency physicians are learning to “tweet”. Ann Emerg Med 2009; 54(2): A23-A25. [fulltext]
• Berger E. Emergency medicine in the blogosphere: The irreverent wit of the specialty’s unofficial voice. Ann Emerg Med 2009; 49(5): 612-614. [fulltext]
• Berners-Lee T, Hendler J, Lassila O. The semantic web. Sci Am 2001; 10 May.
• Boulos M, Moramba I, Wheeler S. Wikis, blogs and podcasts: a new generation of web-based tools for virtual collaborative clinical practice and education. BMC Med Educ 2006; 6: 41.
• Cadogan MD. Web 2.0 rollercoaster. A ride we should all take. Emerg Med Australas. 2009 Feb;21(1):1-3. PMID: 19254306.
• Giustini, D (@giustini). How Web 2.0 is changing medicine. BMJ 2006; 333:1283 — Web 3.0 and medicine. BMJ 2007;335: 1273-1274
• McLean R, Richards BH, Wardman JI. The effect of Web 2.0 on the future of medical practice and education: Darwikinian evolution or folksonomic revolution? MJA 2007; 187 (3): 174-177
• Smith R. What clinical information do doctors need? BMJ 1996;313:1062-1068 (26 October)

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