Years of schooling and training for medical degrees may not teach physicians to be good at social media. Although national and international medical congresses have lately been encouraging attendees to publish Twitter posts about the conferences, some physicians are struggling to accurately relay information, according to a recent report in The Star Online.
Damian Roland, BMBS, is a post-doctoral research fellow in pediatric medicine at the University of Leicester in the UK and lead author of a study assessing the accuracy of tweets posted by physicians at a medical conference. Dr. Roland tested the accuracy of research findings shared by attendees on Twitter during the College of Emergency Medicine annual scientific conference in September 2013.
There were 14 speakers at the conference who participated in the experiment. Out of 37 tweets, speakers found only 16 accurately reflected findings, while another 16 tweets were partially accurate. Three tweets misrepresented speakers' key points, and in two cases the speakers were unsure of the accuracy.
Various reasons might account for the prevalence of inaccurate tweets. A 140-character limit may make composing tweets with a lot of information a challenge. Misunderstanding tone and brevity could pose other problems, according to Dr. Roland. It's also possible inaccurate tweets are a result of the speakers not doing a good job explaining their research, or of the physicians not using the best language to tweet the results.
"Most research can be summarized into a small headline as long as a link is added to the [background material] to avoid confusion," Dr. Roland suggested.
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