Just as physicians became accustomed to wearing pagers 40 years ago or being tied to smartphones 2 decades ago, many have become active on social media as it entered their practices.

The 21st century’s primary communication channel has become such a part of everyday life that several members of the cancer care community formed Collaboration for Outcomes using Social Media in Oncology (COSMO), which held an inaugural, virtual two-day meeting last year.

COSMO began as a crowdsourced group of professionals interacting on Twitter regularly about 6 years ago, according to Don S. Dizon, MD, FACP, FASCO, head of community outreach and engagement at the Cancer Center at Brown University and head of the breast and pelvic malignancies program at Lifespan Cancer Institute.

Don S. Dizon

“It was an informal network of professionals who wanted to look at social media collaborations and really answer the question of why we need to do it now,” Dizon told Healio. “Instead of doing the lofty ‘because you should,’ or relying on altruism, we were just trying to get down to what can we gain professionally from it, but also outlining the risks more clearly.”

Two of COSMO’s planning committee members, Dizon and Deanna J. Attai, MD, FACS, spoke with Healio about the dos and don’ts of social media use among oncologists.

Attai, associate clinical professor of surgery at David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California Los Angeles, said Twitter has evolved over the past decade from a novelty among physician health care providers for sharing information at meetings to an essential tool for a variety of reasons.

Deanna J. Attai

“One is public health messaging, and I think this has been exemplified due to the COVID pandemic,” said Attai, who has held roles as working group and/or social media editor with Annals of Surgical Oncology, JCO Oncology Practice and ASCO. “I’m definitely seeing more and more physicians really embrace the use of social media to help get accurate information out.”

But in operating a Twitter account, for instance, there can be a fine line between tweeting from a professional or a personal point of view. For Attai, the take-home message is simple: own your content.

“Instead of now saying, ‘Keep your content professional,’ what I say is, ‘Yes, like it or not, as a physician, you’re held to a different standard by the public,’” Attai said. “If you want to put out pictures of you at parties or in a bathing suit at a beach, just own your content. And you must be prepared because that may have a negative impact on you professionally.”

Social media beginners may not understand that a simple “like” on a tweet can be translated as an endorsement and seen by fellow users, according to Attai. Depending on the subject matter — endorsing a tweet about a sports team would seemingly have fewer potential pitfalls than one from a divisive political figure — interacting with social media can lead to trouble a social media novice didn’t see coming.

Dizon embraces all social media channels and encourages everyone to do the same, but he also recommends beginners take some time before engaging.

“Come on in, the water is fine,” Dizon said. “No one is going to advise you to join all of the various platforms. (But when you do), observe, watch and listen until you’re ready (to engage).”

Once oncologists are comfortable interacting on Twitter and overcome any hesitations to join a platform or a conversation, there are many benefits that can help them professionally in practice, according to Attai and Dizon.

Attai has been a regular moderator of #BCSM (breast cancer social media), a weekly forum that began in 2011 as a place for providers, patients and others to discuss breast cancer questions and concerns. In 10-plus years, Attai’s biggest takeaway has been how the weekly Twitter meeting place has improved practitioner-to-patient communication.

“I think many of us feel we have great relationships with our patients, and we encourage them to talk about everything — their treatments, side effects, everything else. But it became apparent very quickly that online you see a very different side of the patients than you do in the exam room, kind of their unfiltered view,” Attai said. “Initially, I was the only doctor on the chat and I didn’t quite have a sense of what my role was or how I really fit in. I just did a lot of listening and realized that, in the office, we’re barely scratching the surface of the patient experience.”

Social media can also be a place for physicians to interact easily with peers who they may otherwise have trouble finding, according to Dizon and Attai. Becoming social media-friendly can lead to research collaborations, not unlike COSMO itself.

They also recommend that, for oncologists, it may be a place where they can easily disseminate and discuss factual information with others, talk about specific clinical research and, perhaps, play a role in increasing trial accrual.

Attai and Dizon said social media users should read information in posts carefully before sharing them and do a small amount of digital homework before fully engaging in a conversation.

“In surgery, one of the things they say is the reason surgery residency is so long is because you need to learn when not to operate, right? So, you don’t have to participate in every discussion. You don’t have to respond to every comment,” Dizon said.

“Most of us just want to have constructive and mutually beneficial conversations,” he said. “You want to take a couple seconds, especially when you’re new, to just make sure that’s a conversation you actually want to have.”