Barriers to Utilizing Social Media Platforms in Emergency Medicine Residency Programs

Background Residency programs seek to incorporate various social media (SoMe) platforms into their educational curricula, yet little is known regarding the potential roadblocks towards implementation. Our objective was to assess the current utilization of SoMe platforms and identify common barriers to implementation by emergency medicine (EM) residency programs. Methods Members of the Council of Emergency Medicine Residency Directors (CORD) Information Technology (IT) Committee developed an anonymous survey distributed to representatives from EM residency programs using the “CORD Community” internet forum. Descriptive statistics including percentages for numerical data as well as Fisher’s exact test for categorical data were used to report results. Results We received 116 individual responses from faculty, fellows, and residents of EM residency programs. The most common institutional, departmental, technological and knowledge barriers identified were restricted access to blogs (12.9%), insufficient protected time (17.2%), insufficient IT support to host the platform (16.4%), and a lack of knowledge among faculty of how to utilize blogs (23.3%) respectively. Ten respondents (8.6%) reported that their programs had not attempted to utilize any SoMe platforms. Community-based programs and smaller programs (<24 residents) were significantly more likely to identify barriers to SoMo use among this cohort. Conclusion Utilization of SoMe platforms for resident education by EM residency programs is increasingly common, but significant obstacles exist on many levels that prevent programs from leveraging these innovations for knowledge translation. This is particularly common for community-based and small residency programs. Awareness of these common barriers will allow institutions and programs to better anticipate and design solutions to overcome these obstacles.