E-PLATFORMS

Sections

1. Five e-platforms I utilize throughout my daily work in healthcare, why i use these and what makes these applications successful.
2. A brief description on the positive and negative sides of healthcare social media.
3. A brief self evaluation, too.

The e-platform tools in daily life and in healthcare I most commonly use are:

1. Microsoft Bookings page: allows students and residents to book a research meeting or case discussion with me. This link, once set-up, allows me to preset my calendar hours during which i can eet with students. Students access a link which appears at the bottom of my email signature and help themselves with booking a meeting. I have preset some of the available times as in-person, and other times as Teams meeting only. This link saves valuable time and even no need for me to create a separate Doodle for each meeting!
2. Teams: A game changer for me. I have so many multisdiciplinary consultations either at the hospital or with international research collaborators. The tool saves travel time, and precious hospital time when in need of urgent multi-specialty consultations.
3. Read: A digital tool for curating research papers on preset fields of interest. The app updates itself- with each new article relevant to my predetermined keywords (authors I want to follow, various medical diagnoses I study) and gives me freedom to open at leisure and either skim the abstract or download the whole PDF through my library’s conection.
4. Zotero: A free online, reference manager. It has a word add-on which creates a reference list which changes style with a click of the mouse to adapt to the journal style I want to send my manuscript to. The platform is intuitive, clear and relatively bug-free.
5. Microsoft calendar: My work calendar is set to sync with my private calendar and vice versa. This allows my vacation time to show as busy on my work calendar so that colleagues and students cannot use tool no. 1 above (Microsoft Bookings) at times I am away. I cannot imagine my life withought Microsoft calendar.
   

Social media in healthcare

Social media in healthcare carries significant risks. I have seen patients come in with fixed ideas about their “grave” diagnosis (or vice versa), all based on advice they received by fellow bloggers and social media users. This ranges from Facebook advice to Reddit forums dedicated to medical subtopics. AI search engines have made this even more difficult to adapt to. Here is one example: https://www.reddit.com/r/breastcancer/comments/1h5qbcd/need_help_deciding_next_treatment_options/

Self assesment and reflections

This section is only a brief glimpse of the incomprehensible array of digital tools and platforms we use privately and at work. They make life much, much easier! As a person who grew up before the internet era, I absorbed these tools with great eagerness. All of the tools I listed above were a real need during my daily life and I am grateful they were developed. For many of these e-platforms – I required testing for usability. I changed these multiple times. For instance for the reference manager tool; I have used at leats 4 prior tools over 20 years (reference manager on floppy discs, reference manager online, Mendeley, Lean Library), and moved on as newer ones offered further benefits.