Twitter-Augmented Journal Club: Educational Engagement and Experience So Far.

Social media is a nascent medical educational technology. The benefits of Twitter include (1) easy adoption; (2) access to experts, peers, and patients across the globe; (3) 24/7 connectivity; (4) creation of virtual, education-based communities using hashtags; and (5) crowdsourcing information using retweets. We report on a novel Twitter-augmented journal club for anesthesia residents: its design, implementation, and impact.

Prehospital spinal immobilization and the backboard quality assessment study.

Introduction: Prehospital spinal immobilization (PSI) for patients with suspected spinal injury has been the universal standard of practice for emergency medical services (EMS) in the United States since the early 1970s. PSI research has faced numerous methodological difficulties, including an inability to evaluate whether the immobilizations being studied were carried out appropriately. The purpose of this study was to assess the quality of spinal immobilization to a long spine board in patients presenting via EMS to an emergency department (ED).