social media review

Recapping Pediatric Anesthesiology 2017 (#SPAATX2017)

By Sean Barnes, MD MBA; Sapna Kudchadkar, MD; and Robert Greenberg, MD
Johns Hopkins Hospital
and Sean Flack, MBChB FCA
Seattle Children’s Hospital
@seanflack29

Physicians across multiple disciplines have embraced social media as a way to gain and share knowledge, network, and disseminate information to patients. Within social media, Twitter has become the most efficient method of social media communication in healthcare. Through a grassroots effort, the Society for Pediatric Anesthesia made a splash with the number of engagements at the recent SPA/AAP Pediatric Anesthesiology 2017 meeting in Austin Texas.

Prior to the start of the conference we registered the hashtag #SPAATX2017 with Symplur Signals to track Twitter metrics throughout the conference. When the dust had settled and a champion had been crowned in “Who wants to be a Millionaire?” the conference hashtag had generated 227 users, 2,195 tweets, and over 1.7 million impressions. An impression is a metric that represents the reach of your audience by taking into account the number of tweets and the number of followers for every participant.

To put this in perspective, last year in Colorado Springs the conference hashtag (#SPACOS2016) resulted in 52 users, 232 tweets, and 243,818 impressions. As the graph of cumulative impressions above shows, we surpassed those numbers before the main conference kicked off with engagement at CCAS & SPPM 2017.

Below is a collage of some of the top contributors. It is important to note that many of them were not even in the state of Texas during the time period evaluated-the power of social media.

Beyond the conference hashtag, analysis of other hashtags used alongside #SPAATX2017 on social media (or #SoMe) mirrored the themes of the conference. The network graph below shows the emphasis on Early Recovery After Surgery (#ERAS), pain (#PedsPain or #Pain), and opioids (#Opioids or #OpioidEpidemic). Another reflection as to the reach of #SPAATX2017 on Twitter is that the conference hashtag was used in tweets written with 10 different languages.

Recapping the SPA/AAP Pediatric Anesthesia Conference Twitter footprint highlights the core principles of why so many physicians are turning to social media: lifelong learning, global interaction, and an enriched conference experience.