Healthcare Hashtags: Why Everyone in Healthcare Needs to "Like" Social Media

As we hurtle deeper into the 21st century, the rate of change in the world of healthcare is accelerating. New diseases emerge quickly and new technologies keep pace. What you learned in the healthcare industry or, if you are a provider, in medical school five, ten, or twenty years ago remains a good foundation, but may represent a reality disconnected from the present.

The World Health Organization has warned that infectious diseases are emerging at an unprecedented rate. Since the 1970s, at least 40 new infectious diseases have been identified including avian flu, swine flu, SARS, MERS, Ebola, chikungunya, Zika, and most recently the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2.

Why is this happening? People are traveling much more frequently and far greater distances than in the past. We are living in huge cities—especially in Asia— and coming into closer contact with wild animals, helping infectious diseases spread with lightning speed.

For example, SARS-CoV-02 was identified in December 2019. Despite massive global efforts at containment, just one year later, in December 2020, the worldwide toll stood at over 76 million infections and 1.82 million deaths. At the two-year mark we reached over 729 million infections and 6.72 million deaths. Even today, the disease lingers, and an estimated one in four adults in the U.S. remains unvaccinated or partially vaccinated.

A huge challenge presented by the Covid-19 pandemic was the lack of reliable information about how it spread and how our patients could protect themselves from it. Clinicians were (and still are!) faced with patients who have incomplete or erroneous ideas about what Covid-19 is, how they could catch it, and why they should get vaccinated. For these reasons, it’s imperative that everyone in healthcare arm themselves with accurate information to pass along to those who need it. This requires the recognition of a silent burden anyone who enters the healthcare field signs up for—a commitment to becoming a lifelong learner.

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In 2023, our older patients suddenly began hearing about respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. A flood of ads appeared on television for RSV vaccinations for adults. RSV has been around for decades, and has mostly infected premature infants and babies up to 12 months. 

But anyone can catch it, and people over 65 can develop serious complications including pneumonia and an exacerbation of asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and congestive heart failure (CHF). But in 2023 two RSV vaccines for older adults were approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)— and the advertising floodgates opened.

No one in the healthcare field wants to feel overwhelmed or out of touch. We all want to enjoy our jobs and feel good about the service we provide. To act responsibly and with the best interests of the patient in mind, we all must remain one step ahead in two bodies of knowledge:

1. Traditional avenues: The peer-reviewed science of new diseases and their treatments as they emerge into the healthcare arena has always been our professional foundation, as well as consulting with experts in the field as much as possible. We always need to know our business better than our customers do.

2. Non-traditional avenues: TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook don’t sound like medical sources of information to anyone who works in healthcare, but they can be the go-to source of solutions for anyone who is not in healthcare. Instead of just relying on science, PubMed, and UpToDate, healthcare workers need to regularly review and be familiar with the anecdotal information our patients consume. This will allow us to be prepared for more informed discussions, anticipate what our patients may tell us, and improve health literacy for the communities we serve.

This is a lifelong learning process. It never ends. We owe it to ourselves and our constituents to keep up with the rapid pace of advances in traditional healthcare research as well as the flood of unproven information that our patients encounter, whether or not they seek it—because it seeks them!