Make a Journal Feel as if it Was Mailed Back From the Future

Optimal patient care hinges on physicians remaining up to date with developing medical knowledge. With ever increasing clinical demands however, the ability of physicians to do this is compromised. While the structure of journal based reports requires the devotion of significant time to glean emerging medical findings, social media can grab an individual's attention and then direct them to external media sites, so as to obtain more specific and detailed information of emerging medical findings. If medical journals were to fully embrace social media, physicians would have a more time-cost effective means for staying up to date.

Specific aims Using the investigator's experience as editors of two medical education based blogs, the Specific Aims of this project is to determine if a combined journal and social media-based education strategy will be more likely to continuously engage physicians. The investigators will specifically test whether physicians who access a medical journal blog will have better knowledge of the information contained in a journal, measured by CME-based questions of journal articles than they would if they only received links to the journal's site.

Specifically, the investigators will randomize participants into 3 groups with all interventions done by e-mail: group 1 is the usual care group, and will receive no intervention except for a reminder every six months to take a test of journal-based Continuing Medical Education (CME) questions from 2 anesthesiology journals; group 2 will get e-mailed web links to different specific articles, including articles on which the CME questions are based, published in 2 anesthesiology journals Monday through Friday with a reminder to take the same test every six months; and group 3 will get e-mailed web links to blogs Monday through Friday based on the same specific articles as in group 2; each daily blog will focus on a specific article, including articles on which CME questions are based, the blogs will have web links to the articles on which they are based and every six months group 3 will get a reminder to take the same test. This will continue for 2 years' duration. Every six months, the investigators will assess knowledge of material contained in the two journals using CME material from the journals.

The investigators hypothesize that those participants randomized to group 3, the group that will receive web links to blogs, will stay more informed, as measured by the test score of CME-based questions. The investigators expect that both groups 1, usual care, and 2, e-mailed links to articles, will have a similar low score as the investigators found in a preliminary study of anesthesiologists who were presented with a set of journal-based CME questions.

Public Health Significance. This study will demonstrate the utility of journal based blogs as a support to physicians in their effort to remain up to date with developing medical knowledge.