Feature SIR, connected
How the SIR Connect Open Forum has maximized collaboration among members for improved patient care By James J. Morrison, MD, and James Benjamin Moroney, MD
S
ocial media has evolved into an integral method of modern personal and professional communication. Health care
is no exception. From online patient portals and physician rating sites to telemedicine and biometric data apps, social media is used extensively every day in health care.
Since SIR Connect’s launch, the Open Forum has provided an innovative social media platform on which SIR members can collaborate. Since it went live in February 2015, the more than 9,000 posts have disseminated information, answered questions and shared a vast array of experiences. Unlike most online forums, SIR Connect provides content sharing exclusively among SIR members, enhancing the quality and transparency of shared information while strengthening the sense of community.
Despite the popularity of such online collaborative networks for medical knowledge sharing and education, little is known about the specific content being shared and how practitioners use the information. To better understand the impact of this platform on IR, we evaluated each post on the Open Forum over a two-year period, from February 2015 to March 2017.
Borrowing from qualitative research methods, we started by developing a taxonomy of discussion threads and response posts before applying the derived categorization across the dataset. This type of qualitative analysis has been previously implemented in various online communities to better understand user content and traffic2
.
We generated the initial taxonomy by evaluating a subset of 100 posts and
Acknowledgment: The authors thank Sukjin Koh, MD, and Xiao-Yue Han, MD, for their assistance with the research on which this article was based. 34 IRQ | WINTER 2019
categories empirically created by each researcher. The group of researchers ultimately agreed on 14 discussion thread themes, 12 discussion topics and 10 response types to encompass the diverse forum content (Table 1). Three researchers (one IR attending and two
4th-year medical students) independently applied the established taxonomy to the 4,814 individual posts collected over the two-year study period (827 initial posts and 3,987 response posts). Discrepancies among authors were reevaluated until a final consensus was established.
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