Using Social Media Tools to Build an Active and Effective Social Media Presence about Palliative Care

Despite the rapidly increasing need for palliative care education, the number of experts able to meet the training need is inadequate. Social networks are an effective and economical way to disseminate palliative knowledge and increase global awareness of quality end-of-life care (EOLC). Using Wordpress, the Journal of Palliative Medicine (in collaboration with Stanford) launched a blog on 07-01-2011 and automatically synchronized it with Facebook, Twitter, Disqus and YouTube using widgets. An OpenID widget empowers users to log into the portal by using their existing FaceBook, Twitter, AOL user accounts and precludes the need to create a new password. Free content dissemination is done by an RSS feed. As of 2-14-2012, the JPM Blog has 35 volunteer authors, 136 posts, and 436 comments by diverse users. Strengths include the low costs of creating and maintaining the blog (6 hours/week spent by a high-school student working as the blog intern), multi-disciplinary authors, global utility and collaboration with Stanford University. Challenges encountered were lack of computer literacy in authors and concerns about HIPAA sensitivity. The blog has become a high-traffic global palliative learning network with about 2,500 hits per day and 120,192 hits (excluding bots and spider traffic) just in December 2012. USA, France, India, Canada & Australia are the top five users. “Spiritual issues in EOLC” is the most common search phrase. Users are most interested in caregiver stress and provision of psycho-social support dying patients and families. Social media is an effective way to disseminate EOLC knowledge globally.