San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium 2013

This week I was happy to be able to attend my first-ever San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, which is probably the largest and most successful scientific conference devoted exclusively to breast cancer research and treatment. The meeting was exciting, intellectually stimulating, and full of great insights into both the basic and translational aspects of the disease and practical management. While I won't give in to hyperbole and say that there were "practice-changing" findings around every corner (a phrase I did hear a few times while there), a number of important research studies were discussed that I know will influence the care I give to breast cancer patients as soon as I return to my practice tomorrow.

As expected, the backchannel of the Twitter stream (using the #SABCS13 hashtag) was very active, despite some annoying WiFi woes in the convention center, with over 5700 tweets and 16+ million impressions. Thanks to the folks at symplur.com, full analytics and a transcript of the tweets can be downloaded here. If you weren't following along live during the meeting, reading the Twitter stream can provide some interesting glimpses into the science that was presented and immediate reactions and commentary.

There was plenty of media coverage from mainstream news sources, as well as specialty media like MedPageToday and the ASCO Post. Don't miss the press releases from the Symposium web site or these helpful audio interviews with some of the speakers.

And finally, I am grateful to Dr. Deanna Attai, breast surgeon and #BCSM Tweetchat co-moderator, for asking Dr. Julie Gralow and me to write blog posts for the BCSM Community site about some of the research findings presented. Rather than wasting electrons by duplicating my post here, I am linking to it here on the BCSM Community blog page. Dr. Gralow's post can be found here. Feel free to comment below on my post or anything else you wanted to share about the Symposium and findings.

My 12/4/13 talk at Johns Hopkins - "Social Media for Professional Education and Patient Engagement"

Today I was honored to be able to give a talk at Johns Hopkins on the topic of healthcare-related social media. This was a joint seminar of the Cancer Outcomes and Health Services Research Interest Group and the Johns Hopkins Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology, and Clinical Research. I set up a Twitter feed in advance using the hashtag #cohsrig13 and prescheduled a series of tweets to go out with links to references for some of my slides. The audience was engaged and enthusiastic, and several of them live-tweeted my talk - which I strongly encouraged of course.

I created a Storify with all of the tweets from today associated with the #cohsrig13 hashtag here. 

I've prescheduled tweets when I've given talks before, and I think it's a potentially effective way to share references realtime and encourage interaction. I've never done a Storify before this but it's incredibly simple and seems to be useful for archiving this type of event. Let me know what you think.