The Abstract

SA-PO661

NephMadness 2014, a Social Media Campaign to Promote Nephrology Education and Interest

Joel Topf St. John Hospital/Providence, Detroit, MI

Matthew A. Sparks Duke, Durham, NC

Edgar V. Lerma Univ of Illinois, Chicago, IL

Warren L. Kupin Univ of Miami, Miami, FL

Kenar D. Jhaveri Hofstra North Shore, New Hyde Park, NY.

Background: We created an online homage to the Men’s College Basketball Tournament to teach about 8 areas of nephrology. The teaching was integrated into a game where participants tried to predict winners of head-to-head match-ups between nephrology concepts. The authors provided editorial content to provide context and background to guide participants as well as rationale to explain the winners of each match-up.

Methods: The tournament was announced and hosted on the blog eAJKD.com. Signing up for the contest and predicting the winners was done via a third-party site designed to host similar contests. Twitter, blog posts, and e-mails were used to publicize the contest and educational material. We registered the hashtag #NephMadness in order to track Twitter discussions about the contest. We also tracked web site traffic.

Results: The contest was composed of 64 nephrology concepts, distributed across 8 subjects. The 8 core subjects were: toxins, hypertension, dialysis, regeneration, AKI, electrolytes, kidney stones and biologics. Detailed, evidence-based, referenced descriptions, for each concept were published to the blog by select content experts. Concurrent with the Men’s College Basketball Tournament, the field of 64 concepts was narrowed in a progressive elimination pattern until a single winner remained. The contest attracted 273 entries. 160 were from doctors or medical students (93 from U.S. medical schools, 68 from international schools). Participants came from 23 countries however 79% were from the U.S. We tracked 1,448 tweets from 160 unique accounts, providing 1.9 million impressions on Twitter using the hashtag #NephMadness.

Conclusions: The social media campaign was successful in attracting people to interact and learn about nephrology. Traffic to the website, the blog of the AJKD, was the highest in its history by a wide margin. Increased employement of social media and educational games could provide a unique portal for improving medical education.