#FOAMed quality

Podcast – Assessing on-line medical education resources with Peter Brindley

By / / #FOAMed, Emergency Medicine, Podcast, Social Media

Last year I was contacted by Peter Brindley, Leon Byker and Brent Thoma to collaborate on a paper for the Journal of the Intensive Care Society. The aim was to help people understand a little about quality in assessing #FOAMed and to explain some of the past, current and metrics that have been used to try and quantify quality. The premise is that this is important not because it matters to me or you, but rather that such assessments are made by others and that can have an impact on many aspects of our work. Whether that’s right or wrong is clearly open to debate, but we cannot escape the fact that they exist. You can read the paper here, and the abstract is shown below.

Abstract

The internet is increasingly used to propagate medical education, debate, and even disinformation. Therefore, this primer aims to help acute care medical professionals, as well as the public. This is because we all need to be able to critically appraise digital products, appraise content producers, and reflect upon our own on-line presence. This article discusses the challenges and opportunities associated with online medical resources. We then review Free Open Access Medical Education (FOAMed) and the key tools used to assess the trustworthiness of on-line medical products. Specifically, after discussing the pros and cons of traditional academic quality metrics, we compare and contrast the Social Media Index, the ALIEM AIR score, the Revised METRIQ Score, and gestalt. We also discuss internet search engines, peer review, and the important message behind the seemingly tongue-in-cheek Kardashian Index. Hopefully, this primer bolsters basic digital literacy and helps trainees, practitioners, and the public locate useful and reliable on-line resources. Importantly, we highlight the continued importance of traditional academic medicine and primary source publications.

I was delighted to be asked as I’m well known as a bit of a sceptic when it comes to trying to measure #FOAMed. We have published it on the past and in retrospect have been a bit tough on such attempts as I’m not sure that we always understood the motivation. It is arguably inevitable that medical education consumers will make comparisons, that those new to #FOAMed will want to know what ‘quality’ looks like and that there are certain characteristics of #FOAMed sites that are associated with more reliable content. Such ideas led to the development of scores such as the Social Media Index (SMi), the ALiEM AIR score and the METRIQ and rMETRIQ scores. You can read more about these in the paper.

More recently we have seen large search engines such as Google take a more proactive approach to rating medical information through upgrades to the search protocol such as EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness). Another big change is due which I understand will focus on the speed and stability of websites. Something that can be improved by webmasters, but with the expense of time and money which sadly moves us away from the initial aims of #FOAMed, or at least makes them more difficult to achieve.

I got together with the lead author, Peter Brindley to talk through the current measures, and a few of the more ridiculous ones by revealing that we are both science Kardashians (Peter=7, Simon=39!), and to record a podcast on the main points. We hope you enjoy it and learn a little about the complex issues that surround the question of whether a particular #FOAMed blog/podcast/video can be quantified as ‘good’. My personal opinion is that we are not there yet, and in many ways it’s not a destination I would choose to pursue. However, I do recognise that the rest of the world, notably research organisations, employers, academic promotion panels etc. may wish for some quantitative measure. If they do (and they do) then understanding what’s out there already is worth a few minutes of your time.

References

Cite this article as: Simon Carley, "Podcast – Assessing on-line medical education resources with Peter Brindley," in St.Emlyn's, April 9, 2021, https://www.stemlynsblog.org/assessing-on-line-medical-education-resources-a-podcast-with-peter-brindley/.

Thanks so much for following. Viva la #FOAMed

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