Surgeons rely on their peers for support, professional interaction, and advancing patient care. But when they're working alone in a rural area, that support can be hard to come by.
That's why the American College of Surgeons, which counts more than 3,500 rural surgeons among its members, is launching an online community aimed at linking them together. We're isolated, sometimes separated 50 miles, or sometimes 500 miles, from each other. So the professional interaction to get that reinforcement of what you're learning is heard to come by," said Tyler Hughes, MD, FACS, co-community editor of the Rural Surgeons Web Portal and a rural surgeon himself. He describes the effort as a realtime, interactive tool that allows its members to "geographically hop over the distances and develop real relationships."
The site, which will go live on May 5 at the Rural Surgery Symposium and Workshop in Chicago, will include interactive discussions and networking on patient cases and care; interactive online events; online educational opportunities; and a profile tool that allows users to filter information and discussions by their own interests and practice areas, among other features.
Hughes is careful to point out that this community will not be Facebook for surgeons. Although it's technically a social network, the topics of discussion will not be trivial ones.
"Our emphasis is not 'what did you have for breakfast?' Our emphasis is on professional networking with the intent of improving surgical care," he said. "This is a mechanism that can change the outcome of a patient today because it imparts information at the speed of light."
Hughes said the network stems from the popularity of the rural surgeon community on the ASC's Web portal.
"We went from a few hundred hits on the portal up to almost 5,000," Hughes said, so the organization wanted to know: "How do we take this to the next level to make it a true community?"
He said the goal of the new community will be to change rural surgeons' information seeking efforts and also connect with them via multiple platforms, including personal computers, laptops, and mobile devices, so surgeons can talk to each other and discuss the information that they learn about in isolation.
"It's one thing to read about it in a journal or be informed about a new event but you really want to interact with your colleagues, in terms of, 'Do you believe this? I'm not sure I believe that.' Or 'Have you tried this and did it work?'" he said.
In launching the community, ASC will also undertake an outreach effort to engage its rural surgeon members. But Hughes said hospital leaders can promote the community themselves throughout their own organizations, by doing things like putting information about the community in their hospital newsletters.
"We can compress the time-lag it takes between really good surgical discoveries and techniques into weeks or months instead of years. That's really the challenge we have as surgeons today, since things change so rapidly," he said.
He adds that the site is also a way to build the collective knowledgebase. For example, rural surgeons might do only hundreds of endoscopies individually, but do thousands collectively.
"To bring them all together to share their collective experience [has] got to improve performance," he said.
Alexandra Wilson Pecci is an editor for HealthLeaders.
