The First Year of Hematology Oncology Fellows -- a Social Media Community for Hematology/Oncology Trainees

Abstract

Background: While resources exist to address the needs of graduate medical trainees, online resources to assist trainees with specialty-specific professional development have not been fully developed or described in the past. The Hematology-Oncology Fellows Network (@HemOncFellows) is an online community for hematology-oncology trainees in all stages of training, including medical students, residents, fellows, and doctoral students. The network's goals are to provide professional development in hematology-oncology, create a community and safe space for hematology-oncology trainees, and amplify the voices and needs of trainees. In addition, the network is contributing to educational development of fellows by conducting twitter spaces, which are informal discussions on twitter, educational and professional development. Methods: The Hem Onc Fellows community was founded in February of 2021. Demographics of newsletter subscribers were gathered, and qualitative and quantitative analysis was performed. Twitter analytics data was used to see the outreach and engagement with the @hemoncfellows twitter account. Results: Since its inception, the Hem-Onc Fellows Network has grown to more than 3400 followers. The highest impressions per month have been 93.4K with mean twitter 263 impressions per tweet in the month of July 2022. The mean engagement per tweet was 3.4%. The network hosts Twitter Spaces (TS) with guests every two weeks and distributes a newsletter. During the first season, 22 TS were held between July 2021 and June 2022. The average attendance of twitter spaces is 49.6 persons per session (range 22-187). The most popular twitter spaces events were pre ASH and pre ASCO special events. The hem-onc fellows network contributed to two professional development opinions in ASH hematopoiesis and two in ASCO connections. One hundred twenty-one people subscribed to the newsletter. 53% of subscribers were male. 34% were internal medicine residencies, 31% were hematology-oncology fellows, 9% were attendings, 5% were Advanced Hematology-Oncology Fellow and 5% were medical students. Subscribers were from 21 different countries. Most participants were United States-based, but there were participants from 21 countries worldwide. Conclusions: We demonstrate that implementing a trainee network on Twitter attracted participation and engagement from a diverse pool of trainees worldwide. TS represents a novel educational tool for engaging trainees and facilitating professional development. We expect further expansion and engagement continuing to the season two of hem-onc fellows network Figure 1View largeDownload PPTFigure 1View largeDownload PPT Close modal