Net Assets: The Social Web for Radiology. Part II. Social Networking for Radiologists

Each exciting step in the evolution of the Web has fostered ever-greater user interactivity. Static Web pages have given rise to dynamic content in blogs, wikis, and RSS (really simple syndication) feeds, and now social-networking Web sites represent the next great opportunity for community building. In the previous Net Assets article, we began our exploration of the social Web by discussing social-bookmarking services, particularly those serving the scientific and medical communities, such as Connotea (http://www.connotea.org). In this Net Assets article, we will delve deeper into the panoply of social-networking tools of Web 2.0, with an exploration of a variety of professional-networking Web sites. Open-ended business networks, such as LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com), are available for anyone to join, whereas others, such as Sermo (http://www.sermo.com) and MedicalPlexus (http://medicalplexus.com), exclusively serve the medical community. Networks such as radRounds (http://www.radrounds.com) and ResearchGate (http://www.researchgate.com) are designed for even more specific niche communities, such as radiologists and scientific researchers, respectively. These venues, for your rich online presence, offer great potential for productivity, education, and other career benefits by simplifying the ease of discovering contacts and offering specialized tools for sharing expertise with like-minded others across town or across the globe.

How do the professional–social-networking Web sites differ from immensely popular general–social-networking Web sites, such as Facebook and MySpace? Although the latter are phenomenal ways to share fun aspects of your life with close friends and family, many of you wish to keep your personal lives separate from your professional worlds. Thus, the more specialized professional networks typically require some form of professional verification, such as confirmation of a medical license or an academic e-mail address (ie, ending in “.edu”) prior to giving you membership access. They are more actively moderated to ensure a professional environment and have more safeguards for excluding spam and other unwanted interactions.

The first and most fundamental activity on any professional-social-networking Web site is the creation of your personal profile. You can think of this as an online business card, on which you post basic information, such as your education and training history, radiology specialty, and any subspecialty board certifications. According to your preferences, you may wish to enrich your profile with wider elements from your curriculum vitae, such as publications, professional memberships, and current clinical and research interests. Your profile is your online presence, and through it, you participate in the abundant activities offered on professional-networking Web sites. One may obtain consults on difficult cases, discuss pressing or controversial health care issues, or perform recruitment or job-search efforts. Some Web sites enable the user to create and discuss teaching files, whereas others focus on collaborative and project management tools, such as shareable online storage for documents and group calendaring functions. We will explore how the various Web sites distinguish themselves with specific features as we discuss each Web site in more detail.

Linkedin

LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com) is a popular professional-networking Web site consisting of close to 40 million members across approximately 170 industries, including health care. Like a virtual business card organizer (Rolodex; Staten Island, NY), the Web site helps users maintain a list of valuable business contacts but leverages the power of social networking to ease communication between its members and help them make useful new contacts. To help ensure that a connection is trustworthy, the Web site maintains a “gated-access approach,” in which any request for contact with another member requires either a preexisting relationship or the intercession of a mutual, trusted contact (1). Thus, you grow your professional network on the Web site through requesting introductions to the contacts of members already in your personal network and, in turn, recommending your own contacts to others, if there is a mutually perceived interest. Membership in the Web site is free, although premium memberships allow users greater contact and search privileges (the cost of premium memberships ranges from $24.95/mo to $499.95/mo). As on other networking Web sites, connections between members are mediated on individual profile pages, on which users list their identifying information and interests. You can designate some information viewable only by first- or second-degree connections (ie, contacts of your contacts), whereas other information is part of your public profile (Fig 1a).

Figure 1a:

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Figure 1b:

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Although we enjoy the collegiality we share with fellow radiologists, Web sites such as LinkedIn can help us maintain our valuable relationships with all others who interact closely with radiology, such as hospital administration, vendors, and cross-disciplinary collaborators in others medical specialties, information technology, and biomedical engineering. Like Facebook, LinkedIn also offers a plug-in architecture for handy third-party applications, such as My Travel (TripIt), which enables us to foresee when we will be in the same city as selected colleagues on the LinkedIn network and make social or business plans as desired (Fig 1b).

Sermo

Sermo (http://www.sermo.com), meaning “conversation” in Latin, is the name of a physician-only Web site, which offers a message board–style format for medical doctors and doctors of osteopathy to discuss and exchange clinical insights (Fig 2). For example, users can post questions, consult each other about interesting and extraordinary cases, respond to polls, earn continuing medical education credits, and discuss journal articles to which the Web site provides access after a free registration process. As opposed to the open nature of LinkedIn, only authenticated U.S.-licensed physicians are allowed membership in Sermo. Also unlike some of the other social networks, Sermo provides its users greater anonymity because its default user profile is only a pseudonym and one's medical specialty. This difference stems partly from the revenue model of the Web site, a model that eschews direct advertising for what the Web site describes as “information arbitrage.” Third parties, such as health care companies, financial service institutions, and governmental bodies are sold access to “listen in” on the questions physicians post to the discussion boards of the Web site and glean potentially valuable trend data and other insights from the ensuring discussions (2). The relative value of members' contributions to discussions is rated by other members, with particular contributors attaining an overall rank derived from their participation in various activities on the Web site, such as posting well-received comments and moderating case conferences. Certain activities, sponsored by client partners of Sermo, even allow a member to earn honoraria, for example, $250 to lead a case discussion. Early privileged access to poll data could certainly be worth the fees for a Sermo client, such as an investment firm analyzing a pharmaceutical company with a “hot” new drug on the market. However, the wisdom of the crowds is also valued by organizations such as the American Medical Association, which partnered with Sermo in 2007, and can provide specific functions in situations such as the recent outbreak of H1N1 (“swine”) influenza, in which Sermo set up a special FluMonitor section on its Web site, allowing users to exchange geographically based clinical observations.

Figure 2:

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There are a few ways you can benefit most directly as a radiologist to the offerings on the Sermo Web site. Because you register under your specialty, your Sermo home page will feature specific postings, continuing medical education offerings, and other activities most relevant to radiology or your reported special interests. You can also navigate directly to the Radiology Postings section and read the questions that radiologists have posted. In a typical example, one radiologist queried the users of the Web site on which standardized uptake value threshold levels others are using for positron emission tomographic interpretation of malignancy and received numerous detailed responses. Many of the questions are from referring clinicians who query radiologist members about the best way to act clinically on puzzling report findings or which is the next best test to request, such as the question posted by one physician who queried whether he should perform yearly screening breast magnetic resonance imaging in a patient with fibrous breasts and a sister already ill with breast carcinoma. The Web site regularly offers a “$100 Sermo Rads Snapshot Diagnosis,” for which the monetary prize is given randomly to one of the correct responders to an imaging-based case quiz.

MedicalPlexus

Created as a new way for physicians to exchange clinical and scientific information, MedicalPlexus (http://www.medicalplexus.com) has the stated goal of providing a “continual global conference on human health.” In addition to standard social-network features, such as profiles and contact management, MedicalPlexus offers specific collaboration tools (Fig 3a). For example, after a registration process that verifies that you are a licensed U.S. physician, you gain access to PlexDrive, a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act–compliant personal online storage space for images, presentations, PDFs (Adobe; San Jose, Calif), and other documents. Linkshare is an application for sharing medical-related Web links, and Answers is an application for users to exchange their thoughts on medical issues. KnowledgeBase is a wikilike community-wide repository of multimedia teaching files, with contributions from radiology, pathology, and dermatology. Collaboration utilities include group calendaring and project management tools (Fig 3b). Currently, MedicalPlexus has members from more than 112 U.S. academic institutions.

Figure 3a:

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Figure 3b:

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radRounds Radiology Network

radRounds (http://www.radrounds.com) is a professional social network designed exclusively for radiologists, yet it also has the most social feel of the Web sites discussed in this article. You are first greeted on its home page with friendly-appearing profile photographs of numerous highlighted members, and the free registration process then walks you through the steps of creating your own personalized radiology-focused profile (Fig 4a). Once your professional profile is established, you can begin to make connections. A common situation is bumping into a colleague from your recent or distant past at a radiology meeting and trying to figure out how you will stay in contact. Instead of simply exchanging business cards and promising to e-mail each other, you can set up a connection via radRounds, which is similar to the way people “friend” each other on Facebook. You can then utilize the network messaging feature of radRounds as an efficient communication tool with new members of your network, as well as with others in your network, including co-committee members in national bodies or colleagues from your current practice. The radRounds search functions can help you identify other potential connections via institution, subspecialty, research topic, or specific clinical interests. Another way to leverage the power of the radRounds social network is by participating in groups (Fig 4b). For example, a radRounds member in a radiology practice affiliated with Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island) created a private group, which was subsequently joined by numerous staff colleagues and affiliated residents. Within their group area on radRounds, the members can have private online case discussions, manage a repository of documents, and maintain a bulletin board of links, including a link to the call schedule of their practice. To facilitate generalized case discussions and to allow its users to manage their own online teaching files on its Web site, radRounds provides a platform for storing images (currently without specific limit), organizing them by topic into various folders, and granting varying levels of viewing permission. The forums feature of radRounds allows users to post questions and elicit collaboration across the wide range of subspecialty interests, practice types, and geographic locations encompassed on the network. For instance, one member has utilized the forums feature to obtain help in building a large collection of radiology images illustrating common eponyms and signs. Other radiologists have collaborated to create the “ultimate radiologist PACS [picture archiving and communication system] wish list.”

Figure 4a:

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Figure 4b:

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ResearchGate

The many Radiology readers who are involved in laboratory or clinical research may have a special interest in ResearchGate (http://www.researchgate.net), the social network for discovering like-minded scientists. An academic radiologist could benefit by finding research collaborations, projects, and needed expertise at ResearchGate. One specific tool available on ResearchGate is a “similar abstract search” tool that encourages one to paste a snippet from an abstract one is composing into its search box and let its “semantic” search algorithm find similar publications. The research-focused discussion groups are relatively underpopulated compared with those in the other Web sites discussed in this article but are potentially useful spots for exchanging ideas on specific study methods as the Web site grows its membership.

Conclusion

Social networks provide the opportunity to enmesh ourselves, through robust online profiles, with the professional community inside or outside of radiology. We can maintain and enrich our contacts with colleagues around the world and even spawn new dynamic relationships that are based on common interests and experience. As with all activities on the Web, appropriate caution should be taken with sharing personal data and close attention should be paid to permissions settings on the various Web sites. Figure 5 summarizes how the various professional social-networking Web sites can be leveraged for our own specific professional needs and interests in radiology.

Figure 5:

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As always, feel free to e-mail requests for future topics you would like to see discussed in Net Assets ([email protected]) or to share your own discoveries of useful Web sites that can enhance the productivity and practice of radiology.