Social media and physicians' online identity crisis.

Physicians are increasingly counted among Face-book’s 1 billion users and Twitter’s 500 million members. Beyond these social media platforms, other innovative social media tools are being used in medical practice, including for online consultation, in the conduct of clinical research, and in medical school curricula. Social media content is brief, characterized as “many-to-many” communication, and able to spread rapidly across the Internet beyond a person’s control.

Core personal competencies important to entering students' success in medical school: what are they and how could they be assessed early in the admission process?

Assessing applicants' personal competencies in the admission process has proven difficult because there is not an agreed-on set of personal competencies for entering medical students. In addition, there are questions about the measurement properties and costs of currently available assessment tools. The Association of American Medical College's Innovation Lab Working Group (ILWG) and Admissions Initiative therefore engaged in a multistep, multiyear process to identify personal competencies important to entering students' success in medical school as well as ways to measure them early in the admission process.