Introduction
The dissemination of scientific developments has conventionally been through two main platforms: medical journals and scientific conferences. In 1665, the Royal Society released the first medical journal, Philosophical Transactions. In 1812, the New England Journal of Medicine published its first edition. As a means to widely circulate advances in medical science in the 19th and 20th centuries, multiple medical journals focusing on medical subspecialties were subsequently founded to share newly discovered data.
The European Society of Cardiology was established around World War II. On 29 January 1949, 14 National Societies established the Board and laid down its by-laws. The following year (1950), the First General Assembly, comprised of 200 people, met in Paris for the World Congress of Cardiology and discussed general cardiology topics. The field of interventional cardiology was born following Andreas Gruentzig’s first successful coronary angioplasty on 16 September 1977 using a balloon dilatation catheter in which he treated a short lesion in the left anterior descending artery. Gruentzig presented the results of his first four angioplasty cases at the 1977 American Heart Association meeting. Between 1978 and 1980, he organised four courses in Zurich, Switzerland, demonstrating his new technique in humans. In 1983, Professor Jean Marco organised the first course on angioplasty with live cases from Toulouse. Over the next 35 years, this course evolved from a French to a European gathering and finally, now an international conference with more than 12 000 attendees.1
As interventional cardiology became more widespread, due to refinements in stent platforms, pharmacotherapy and advances in other technologies, particularly in the structural arena, societies have sought options to accommodate such growth. One such option includes smaller chapters conducting their own regional or institutional workshops and meetings. With the advent of the World Wide Web, individual researchers have relied on the PubMed Medline search to navigate categorised published material. By 2000, other online search engines, such as Google Scholar, further facilitated this process. Societies and journals have also collectively sought to exploit the web to expand their outreach and membership globally. They established their own websites that detail the table of contents and published articles, commentaries and interviews. In addition, visually or technically demanding specialties, such as cardiac imaging and intervention, have used online websites to allow for interactive case discussions, host videos of procedural techniques and demonstrate complex cases including three-dimensional images that would not be possible using more traditional publication platforms. These images, videos and publication links are archived in the website allowing for streamlined future searches by individual investigators.
More recently, social media has become yet another avenue for the interactive sharing of data. Individuals, societies and journals have adopted Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn and Periscope to ‘publish’ and promote new research, techniques, devices as well as post links to upcoming issues and meetings and create quizzes. Unlike journals and conferences, these platforms remain largely unregulated.6 There are no membership or submission requirements, fees, or processes that check if users are licensed physicians. This has generated controversy over the credibility and influence of social media in the educational process.2 The aim of this document is to provide an overview of the use of the various social media outlets. It provides a roadmap to guide the use of social media by clinicians as both an educational tool and a medium to discuss cases and to disseminate research. Finally, an outline on the protection of scientific propriety, patient data and patient–physician rights is highlighted.