My mission is to bring digital knowledge to medical students therefore preparing them for the world full of digital technologies that is coming. This is why I launched the world’s first university course focusing on social media and mobile health for medical students in 2008. Here are a few ways how I try to teach them:
- There is a real credit course at Semmelweis Medical School where I have courses in English and in Hungarian. I try to teach them digital literacy through spectacular and engaging presentations.
- They can answer questions about the topics covered in the lectures on Facebook to gather bonus points for the exam.
- There is an e-learning platform so then any medical student or professional worldwide can access the materials and take the tests for the certification.
- Students get credits for creating medical blogs, Twitter profiles or Wikipedia entries.
As you can see, following the “If you want to teach me, you first have to reach me” approach, I do everything I can to get the message across: every medical professional will be affected by online medical communication.
This is why I was very glad when Symplur contacted me about a potential collaboration. Let’s create a new hashtag #HCSMcourse referring to the widely used healthcare social media (#HCSM) hashtag. This new hashtag would focus on two goals:
- To collect all materials, concepts and ideas about teaching social media in medical education.
- To give students a chance to belong to a global community even after graduating from medical school.
As Twitter is my main communication channel these days, I cannot wait to exploit this idea in even more details.
Take a look at #HCSMcourse
