The Radiology Twitterverse: A Starter's Guide to Utilization and Success

Abstract

The rise of social media use in medicine has changed how health care organizations and providers communicate with patients and interact with other members of the medical community. Active social media engagement has been associated with improvements in patient outreach, peer-to-peer interactions, and medical education. In radiology, however, social media is predominantly used among trainees, with significantly lower rates seen in attending physicians who have been in practice for greater than 15 years. Twitter (Twitter.com, San Francisco, California), along with other social media platforms, puts a face to radiology, helping both patients and other health care professionals understand contributions of radiologists to patient care, research, education, and public health. We aim to provide a starter's guide for radiologists unfamiliar with Twitter (1) to highlight benefits of active Twitter involvement and (2) to remove perceived barriers to active Twitter use.