Abstract

Background - Social media has become a major source of communication in medicine. We aimed to understand the relationship between physicians' social media influence and their scholarly and clinical activity. Methods - We identified attending, US electrophysiologists on Twitter. We compared physician Twitter activity to (a) scholarly publication record (h-index) and (b) clinical volume according to CMS. The ratio of observed vs. expected Twitter followers (obs/exp) was calculated based on each scholarly (K-index) and clinical activity. Results - We identified 284 physicians, with mean Twitter age of 5.0 (SD 3.1) years and median 568 followers (25th, 75th: 195, 1146). They had a median 34.5 peer-reviewed papers (25th, 75th: 14, 105), 401 citations (25th, 75th: 102, 1677), and h-index 9 (25th, 75th: 4, 19.8). The median K-index was 0.4 (25th, 75th: 0.15, 1.0), ranging 0.0008 - 29.2. The median EP procedures was 77 (25th, 75th: 0, 160) and E&M visits 264 (25th, 75th: 59, 516) in 2017. The top 1% electrophysiologists for followers accounted for 20% of all followers, 17% of status updates, had a mean h-index of 6 (vs. 15 for others, p=0.3), and accounted for 1% of procedural and E&M volumes. They had a mean K-index of 21 (vs. 0.77 for others, p<0.0001), and clinical obs/exp follower ratio of 17.9 and 18.1 for procedures and E&M (p<0.001 each, vs. others [0.81 for each]). Conclusions - Electrophysiologists are active on Twitter, with modest influence often representative of scholarly and clinical activity. However, the most influential physicians appear to have relatively modest scholarly and clinical activity.

View details for DOI 10.1161/CIRCEP.120.008847

View details for PubMedID 33030380