Twitter Grand Rounds

     I'm currently into my 2nd week of life here at UTSW with most of my time committed to orientation related things. But today, I was able to resume one of my favorite activities as an academic internist which is attend departmental grand rounds. It's great because the numerous disciplines in internal medicine all gather in one place to hear a respected colleague discuss important research, clinical and non clinical topics in medicine. Today's grand rounds was especially noteworthy because it was given by someone within my own division (general internal med) on the unique topic of secondary cancers in adult survivors of pediatric cancers. As always, it was informative and captured my full attention.
   But grand rounds wasn't always as exciting for me. As a junior faculty in my prior institution I would find myself sitting there at 8 AM, staring at power point slides desperately trying to keep focused or even stay awake. Despite interesting topics and engaging noteworthy speakers, I didn't get much out of it. That was until I entered the world of Twitter and became fully engaged in grand rounds by live tweeting. From that moment, grand rounds became an active fun event instead of a passive attempt at learning (an experience far too familiar from my days in medical school). Twitter became my platform for self learning and engagement as well as an opportunity to share important medical advances and concepts with the world at large. I looked forward to learning and the challenge of feverishly tweeting key facts and themes. Soon, other faculty members, house-staff and medical students became involved as we developed a virtual back channel conversation each morning of grand rounds.
   Now after having left my prior institution for several months I've resumed my live tweeting of grand rounds, having learned several interesting things about pediatric cancer survivors and their heightened risks of adult cancer. In that process, I'm confident, a few others out there in the Twitterverse have a learned a few things as well.  And like most things in social media, the connections we make are a two way street. There are many others out there, doing what I'm doing, sharing their knowledge via social media in an effort to connect our minds and expertise for the purposes of improving medicine.

@SBinternalMed
Twitter account run by former colleagues with tweets from grand rounds, noon conferences and much more!

#foamed
Free open access medical education hashtag.

#meded
Medical Education hashtag

#grandrounds
A generic hashtag of all kinds of grand rounds across the world.

@shabbirhossain
My twitter account

Sir William Osler conducting Grand Rounds

(courtesy of the medical archives at Johns Hopkins University)