Just trying to hook up facebook to NephJC.com

For a team that is supposed to know a lot about social media, we all find Facebook pretty baffling.

TWiN

We are in the process of recalibrating and redesigning #TWiN. DM your suggestions to me. @dr_nikhilshah

What's up with the NephJC signal cityscape

In the last few months we have been scheduling our chats out further and further, however this breaks down when a high impact trial is published. This led to the concept of the emergency NephJC chat. We did it first for AKIKI and ELAIN:

And then most recently for this week's chat on EMPA-REG

#NephJC emergency meeting on empagliflozin for diabetic kidney disease. Next week June 28 and 29. pic.twitter.com/uSc4k5oxne

— Nephrology Jrnl Club (@NephJC) June 24, 2016

Some people have asked about the buildings in the cityscape. They are:

Sears Tower in Chicago for Edgar

Leaning Tower of Pisa for Francesco

The Gherkin in London for Tom and Matt

The Statue of Liberty in New York for Kenar and Scherly

The CN Tower of Toronto for Swapnil (closest I could get to Ottawa)

The Renaissance Center in Detroit for Joel

The AT&T building in Nashville for Anna

The Trans America Pyramid in San Francisco for Graham

That's not the whole team but it is a start.

NephJC Summer Book Club Selection

Thanks everyone for voting. The results are in and Eric Topol's The Patient Will See You Now won.

The voting looked like this:

But the reason we asked how likely you are to read the book was so we could weight the votes. The weighting worked like this:

• 0.2 for I'll read it if I have time
• 0.4 for I'll read it if it is the book I want
• 0.6 for 50-50
• 0.8 for I will buy and start
• 1.0 for scout's honor

This turned out to not really affect the results

So Topol's book it is. The Patient Will See You Now examines how changes in technology are forcing a democratization of medicine and empowering patients in an unprecedented way. This seems like an important theme for today medical climate. The exact date of the chat has not been fixed but it will likely be mid to late July, so start reading. Watch the blog for summaries of all the chapters, similar to how we covered Being Mortal.

Ted Cruz drops out, the primaries are over!

Thanks everyone for voting for what you want covered in NephJC.

The #NephJC primaries (see https://t.co/LtGiykk0y1 … for details): You would like to discuss:

— Nephrology Jrnl Club (@NephJC) April 29, 2016

The winner is a prospective RCT to see if this Pip/Tazo+Vanco toxicity is real. The reference is here. Back ground from NephMadness 2015 here and ALiEM discussed it here. We will be discussing this on May 31 and June 1. There is an #AskASN chat on May24 pushing us back a week.

Don't forget Next Tuesday/Wednesday we go all Acid-Base for a discussion of acetazolamide.

study 

The NephJC Book Club Returns. Vote for your choice.

Last summer we did a book club on Atul Gawande's Being Mortal. The NephJC team blogged its way through every chapter and we did a discussion of the book during one of our Tuesday/Wednesday chats. We think the summer is a great time to slow down from the rapid digestion of medical literature and enjoy a slower paced book. We couldn't decide on a book among ourselves so we are turning to you to pick this Summer's book. Here are the choices:

1. When Breath Becomes Air by Dr. Paul Kalanithi. NYT Review.

2. The Patient will See You Now by Dr. Eric Topol (@erictopol) NYT Review. 

3. How doctors think by Dr. Jerome Groopman. NYT Review

4. On the Move by Dr. Oliver Sacks. NYT Review

5. The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee. Los Angeles Times Review

Next NephJC is May 10th and 11th

We will be discussing the DIABOLO trial of acetazolamide to shorten mechanical ventilation. The Tuesday chat will be at 9PM EDT and the Wednesday chat will be at 8PM London, Noon PDT.

The article can be found at the JAMA website or via Pubmed.

Take a look at Joel's summary of the article.

See this summary by The Bottom Line

Coverage by MedPage Today

#NephJC is now part of Altmetrics

Altmetrics is a company that tracks realtime references, reads and mentions of research articles across the web and social media. They give authors and institutions a sense of what research is moving the needle faster and more comprehensively than reference tracking could. The work NephJC does will now be part captured as part of this goal.

When I read the following on their website, I knew that NephJC and Altmetrics were natural partners:

“Scientists are increasingly discussing papers online, but on social media sites, rather than on publisher’s sites. There’s huge value in being able to see what your peers - and people in other fields - have said about an article. Up until now, this has been difficult to achieve.”

Our spotlight just got a little brighter.

The Neph-Twitterverse discovers Twitter polls

A few weeks ago, the folks at twitter announced they were rolling out Twitter polls. Previously, tweeps would use manually counting responses or the RT-if-you-agree Fav-if-you-don't approach. This is how the polls were supposed to work:

Coming soon! We're rolling out the ability for everyone to create polls on Twitter: https://t.co/pH5a8q9Ujz pic.twitter.com/ijAKEMUdf1

— Twitter (@twitter) October 21, 2015

So what, you might say? A few users (notably @conradhackett from Pew research) played a lot with them, sample poll:

Would you rather spend the next week without TV or Twitter?

— Conrad Hackett (@conradhackett) October 30, 2015

The ease of setting one up, and the option to just click and be done were some of the major selling points. But it wasn't clear if would be just a passing fad or something more. I used one at the #KidneyWk, but there were few responders

So @potasn said at #KidneyWk to end CKD staging. What's your take?

— Swapnil Hiremath, MD (@hswapnil) November 5, 2015

Then Matt decided to poll the #nephjc followers after the suPAR chat

what do you think about suPAR predicting CKD #NephJC

— Nephrology Jrnl Club (@NephJC) November 25, 2015

And Thomas Hiemstra decided to design his next #DreamRCT on therapy for Membranous nephropathy with a series of tweets:

.@hswapnil @NephJC eGFR=65, aPLA2R +, membranous on bx, 9g proteinuria after 6mths ACEi. Now, I would use:

— Thomas Hiemstra (@Thomas_Hiemstra) November 27, 2015

.@hswapnil @NephJC Same scenario, GFR=65, I would randomise to Cyc vs Tacrolimus

— Thomas Hiemstra (@Thomas_Hiemstra) November 27, 2015

Second scenario

.@hswapnil @NephJC eGFR=30, aPLA2R +, membranous on bx, 9g proteinuria after 6mths ACEi. Now, I would use:

— Thomas Hiemstra (@Thomas_Hiemstra) November 27, 2015

.@hswapnil @NephJC Same scenario, GFR=30, I would randomise to Cyc vs Tacrolimus

— Thomas Hiemstra (@Thomas_Hiemstra) November 27, 2015

And it wasn't long before Graham Abra re-ran an older question on the utility of urine eosinophils in allergic interstitial nephritis

Let's re-do this one with the slick new poll feature: Do you order urine eos as part of your AIN workup?

— Graham Abra, MD (@GrahamAbra) November 27, 2015

another one on the duration of steroids in SLE, in remission

In class III/IV lupus nephritis w/ clinical response to MMF+steroids how long is your maintenance rx?

— Graham Abra, MD (@GrahamAbra) November 27, 2015

So we guess polls on twitter are here to say. Nephrology tweeps find it awesome (and I can say so with confidence, backed by facts, or shall we say, a poll?)

Nephro-twitter has suddenly caught on to Twitter polls tonight

— Swapnil Hiremath, MD (@hswapnil) November 27, 2015

Swapnil Hiremath

Kidney Week Wrap-up: How will we remember #KidneyWk 2015?

Kidney Week 2015 may be remembered for a number of different social media moments. The Tweet-Up was a raging success and finally broke through to become what Matt and I envisioned at the Denver Kidney Week in 2015. The success of the tweet-up was largely driven by Satellite Healthcare and their invaluable assistance with promotion and logistics. We can’t thank them enough. Additionally Kidney Week 2015 was marked by both a NephJC and NephMadness poster presentation. This Kidney Week, Matt was invited to give a talk on electronic medical education and he crushed it. But the biggest event, the one I hope we remember 2015 for, was the graduation of the first class of interns from the Nephrology Social Media Collective (NSMC).

Matt, Scherly and Chi with their diplomas and #DreamRCT mugs

We had four very different interns and they each had individually unique experiences with the internship:

Scherly Leon is in her last year of nephrology fellowship and is on a mission. She was already the ASN Public Policy Fellow when she started the Social Media internship. She is tuning her Twitter feed to be a carefully crafted curation of nephrology and social justice content. If you aren’t following Scherly (https://twitter.com/SLeonMD), you are doing it wrong. I think everyone is excited to see what she does with her growing skills as a public physician.

Chi Chu was the only intern who was not a nephrologist and we needed to apply more thought on how to make his experience particularly relevant for him. Chi participated in all of the events and his Which nephrotoxic antibiotic are you? was epic. Likewise his DreamRCT entry was equal parts creative and audacious. He will make an awesome nephrologist someday...if we are lucky enough to get him.

Hector Madariaga was a natural for the NSMC internship and did great work from day one. However, by June it was clear that we were under-utilizing him. So we brought him into NephJC in a more formal way. For the last six-months Hector has been NephJC’s chief archivist. He is in charge of creating the Storify’s from every chat. We hope he will continue to be a key member of the NephJC team. Future editor-in-chief?

Nikhil Shah is the intern who least needed the NSMC internship. He was doing great work before the internship and we just hitched our wagon to his shooting star. His SocialKidney project is an essential tool for tracking social media conversations online. His inspirational story on how he got hooked on nephrology was picked up by MedPage today.  It will be great to have his creativity on the NSMC team in the future.

There were several more interns in the inaugural class:

I have a fellow, resident and two fourth years. When we do ward rounds there are 5 students. #WhoIsThe5thStudent

— Joel Topf (@kidney_boy) November 17, 2015

The fifth student was us. We learned a lot about what does and does not work in a social media internship. We are going to be better next year. We got lucky by requiring participation in NephJC, that turned out to be an exceptional learning tool. But only because the interns didn’t merely tune in and lurk, but actively participated and engaged in the chats. It was a great (if not accidental) flipped classroom experience.

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With the graduation of our inaugural class we are excited to open the application period for the second class of NSMC interns. If you are interested or have questions, feel free to send us an e-mail. If you want to apply for a spot drop us an e-mail and explain:

• Who you are 
• Why you want to do the social media internship
• What experience do you already have with social media (Do not be embarrassed to say none. Do not be embarrassed to say you are really good at Facebook quizes)

The due date for the application is January 24. We will make our decisions and start the program on February 1

 Send applications to NephrologyJC@gmail.com