Utilising social media to educate and inform healthcare professionals, policy-makers and the broader community in evidence-based healthcare

Social media is emerging as key solution to increase collaborative discourse between individuals, institutions and countries. Although evidence of social media’s impact on health policy is limited, its potential to promote knowledge dissemination and provide open forums for critical appraisal of evidence-based literature is increasingly clear. Social media in many ways is the definition of dissemination. It can be an active tool for spreading evidence-based information to a target audience (population) via determined channels (social media platforms) using planned strategies. Social media has a heterogeneous array of definitions as it can describe particular platforms of use (ie, Twitter or Facebook) or a particular methodology of connecting users. Social media in medicine can be defined as any digital media that enables widespread connectivity between users using a defined methodology of approach (ie, blog, podcast and so on).