COMPARING THE DIGITAL FOOTPRINTS OF PULMONARY AND CRITICAL CARE CONFERENCES

Abstract

SESSION TITLE: Education, Research, and Quality Improvement Posters SESSION TYPE: Original Investigation Posters PRESENTED ON: October 18-21, 2020 PURPOSE: Pulmonary and critical care societies, such as the American College of Chest Physicians (CHEST), American Thoracic Society (ATS) and the Society of Critical Care Medicine (SCCM), have large memberships that gather at academic conferences, attracting thousands of attendees to these large annual events. With the growth of social media use among pulmonary and critical care clinicians, our goal was to examine the Twitter presence/digital footprint of these three major medical society conferences. METHODS: We used Symplur Signals (Symplur, LLC) to track the tweets and most active participants of the 2017-2019 annual conferences of CHEST, ATS, and SCCM. Attendance records of participants were obtained from each society. RESULTS: During the study period, there was a large growth in the number of tweets, tweets/hour and users for all three society conferences. ATS and SCCM had higher numbers of tweets in 2019 than CHEST (21,526 and 25,678 vs 14,587) while ATS had largest number of participants compared to SCCM and CHEST (4,616 vs 3,221 and 2,418). For each society and at each meeting, clinicians made up largest group of participants (44-60%) and most of those (69-78%) were physicians. Healthcare organizations made up between 9-18% of participants. ATS had the largest frequency of healthcare organization participants compared to SCCM and CHEST (median 15% vs 11% and 9%; p=0.04) and largest industry presence (median 3% vs 0.3% and 1%; p=0.03). A small cohort of prolific participants was responsible for a large share of the tweets, with more than half of the users at each conference for each society tweeting only once. Physicians who were attending the conference were the largest stakeholder group. CHEST had higher frequency of women in this cohort compared to SCCM and ATS (median 80% vs 56% and 53%; p=0.07). At all conferences, the amount of original content generated was less than amount of retweets (50-72% of all tweets at each conference were retweets). Individuals attending each conference were significantly more likely to post original content than those not attending the conference (53-68% vs 32-47%). Ninety-eight unique users tweeted more than 100 times at one or more of the conferences. There was significant overlap in this group; 14 participants (13 physicians) tweeted more than 100 times at 2 different society conferences and 5 physicians tweeted more than 100 times at 3 different society conferences. The range of participants tweeting more than 100 times was 10-33/conference. CONCLUSIONS: The digital footprints of these pulmonary and critical care society conferences were similar and there was significant overlap in the participants tweeting. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS: Growth in these footprints is largely due to increased activity by a small group of prolific users that attend conferences by multiple academic societies. Further research is needed into how this group is engaged with each medical society. DISCLOSURES: No relevant relationships by William Carlos, source=Web Response No relevant relationships by Christopher Carroll, source=Web Response No relevant relationships by Neha Dangayach, source=Web Response, value=Grant/Research Removed 06/11/2020 by Neha Dangayach, source=Web Response No relevant relationships by Sujatha Kannan, source=Web Response No relevant relationships by Viren Kaul, source=Web Response No relevant relationships by Dina Khateeb, source=Web Response No relevant relationships by Tamas Szakmany, source=Web Response No relevant relationships by Gretchen Winter, source=Admin input Removed 05/06/2020 by Gretchen Winter, source=Web Response No relevant relationships by Gretchen Winter, source=Admin input Removed 05/06/2020 by Gretchen Winter, source=Web Response No relevant relationships by Gretchen Winter, source=Admin input Removed 05/06/2020 by Gretchen Winter, source=Web Response No relevant relationships by Gretchen Winter, source=Admin input Removed 05/06/2020 by Gretchen Winter, source=Web Response