In a previous post on EHR Bloggers, we suggested that the explosive growth of social media in health care threatens long-standing professional norms and physician-patient communication paradigms.
A recent study in JAMA has shed new light on the scope of these challenges.
To gauge the frequency with which medical students post unprofessional content online and describe their schools’ response, Katherine Chretien and colleagues at the Washington, DC, VA Medical Center sent an anonymous survey to deans at 130 institutions affiliated with the Association of American Medical Colleges.
Of the 78 schools that responded, 60% reported incidents in which students had posted unseemly content online. Thirteen percent of the institutions reported violations of patient confidentiality. Other common offenses included the use of profanity (52%) and discriminatory language (48%), and the display of drunkenness (39%) and lewd behavior (38%).
"The number we found was higher than we expected," Chretien told MSNBC. "And these are the incidents that made it to the attention of the deans. This is the tip of the iceberg."
Surprisingly, only 38% of the schools reporting such behavior had adopted formal policies to handle future incidents. An additional 11% reported they were developing such policies. Two-thirds of the schools informally warned the offending students, and there were 3 student dismissals.
Incidents were usually reported by peers or supervisors.
Alas, medical students who indulge in such indiscriminate behavior are no different from other young adults, says Anastasia Goodstein, who follows youth trends on her Ypulse Web site.
And to be sure, medical students have a engaged in bawdy behavior long before Al Gore invented the Internet. Johns Hopkins Medical School’s now defunct Pithotomy Club, for example, was famous for its edgy skits and derisive songs about professors until a particularly ill-advised lampoon of Hopkins Professor Bernadine Healy triggered a series of events that led to its demise.
A recent study in JAMA has shed new light on the scope of these challenges.To gauge the frequency with which medical students post unprofessional content online and describe their schools’ response, Katherine Chretien and colleagues at the Washington, DC, VA Medical Center sent an anonymous survey to deans at 130 institutions affiliated with the Association of American Medical Colleges.
Of the 78 schools that responded, 60% reported incidents in which students had posted unseemly content online. Thirteen percent of the institutions reported violations of patient confidentiality. Other common offenses included the use of profanity (52%) and discriminatory language (48%), and the display of drunkenness (39%) and lewd behavior (38%).
"The number we found was higher than we expected," Chretien told MSNBC. "And these are the incidents that made it to the attention of the deans. This is the tip of the iceberg."
Surprisingly, only 38% of the schools reporting such behavior had adopted formal policies to handle future incidents. An additional 11% reported they were developing such policies. Two-thirds of the schools informally warned the offending students, and there were 3 student dismissals.
Incidents were usually reported by peers or supervisors.
Alas, medical students who indulge in such indiscriminate behavior are no different from other young adults, says Anastasia Goodstein, who follows youth trends on her Ypulse Web site.
And to be sure, medical students have a engaged in bawdy behavior long before Al Gore invented the Internet. Johns Hopkins Medical School’s now defunct Pithotomy Club, for example, was famous for its edgy skits and derisive songs about professors until a particularly ill-advised lampoon of Hopkins Professor Bernadine Healy triggered a series of events that led to its demise.Glenn Laffel, MD, PhD
Sr. VP, Clinical Affairs, Practice Fusion
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