Social Media and Medical Education in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Scoping Review.

Clinicians and institutions must evolve to embrace the use of social media platforms for medical education. Health care professionals can approach social media engagement in the same ethical manner that they would with patients in person; however, health care institutions ultimately must enable their health care professionals to achieve this by enacting realistic social media policies. Institutions should appoint clinicians with strong social media experience to leadership roles to spearhead these generational and cultural changes. Further studies are needed to better understand how health care professionals can most effectively use social media platforms as educational tools. Ultimately, social media is here to stay, influencing lay public knowledge and trainee knowledge. Clinicians and institutions must embrace this complementary modality of trainee education and champion social media as a novel distribution platform that can also help propagate truth in a time of misinformation, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.