Physican personality ZDoggMD’s Facebook Live course garnered more than 34,000 views and 600 comments during his live session.
Physician’s Weekly, a point-of-care company that provides continuing medical education services to physicians, launched its first CME course using Facebook Live.
Physicians like to consume information on sites such as Facebook, which are already part of their daily lives, said Ezra Ernst, CEO of Physician’s Weekly. With that idea in mind, the publishing company worked with continuing education provider Advancing Knowledge in Healthcare and Dr. Zubin Damania, also known as ZDoggMD, a physician personality who is known for transforming popular songs with his own music video and lyrics that focus on health, to launch its first accredited CME and continuing education Facebook livecast for physicians and nurses on December 12.
Damania’s remix of R. Kelly’s Ignition, titled Readmission, has generated about 1.9 million views on YouTube to date.
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The livecast was held on a Monday evening at the start of a working week, and Damania presented a 39-minute interactive CME course for physicians and nurses on how to better understand patients’ decisions that include moral choices such as end-of-life care and vaccinations, highlighting insights from the book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. During the session, viewers were able to post comments and receive replies in real time from the physician.
“Having it live where ZDogg could interact with participants by answering their questions in real time adds an element of excitement,” said Ernst. “If you create excitement in the students, you’re more likely to learn.”
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Damania’s Facebook Live course garnered more than 34,000 views and 600 comments during his live session. Those numbers are expected to grow, as the video will remain on his Facebook page and the Physician’s Weekly website for a year, Ernst said. So far, 369 people have received CME credits for watching and completing an evaluation answering questions discussed during the livecast.
Planning the course was tricky, in part because the companies decided to partner with Damania, who tends to go off script, said Ernst. But they decided that his personality and influence — he has close to 400,000 followers on his Facebook page — were valuable.
“We had a lot of sessions with ZDogg,” said Ernst. “We had to talk around the learning objectives of this particular activity, define what the program was, and work with AKH to map out what the purpose of this education was and what we’re trying to teach.”
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The Facebook Live course is the first in a series of CME initiatives Physician’s Weekly has planned for social-media platforms. The company will continue working with AKH and ZDoggMD to develop more CME livecasts, including the launch of live tweet chats in the coming months, and is considering using Snapchat in the future, said Ernst.
“There’s a trend element to Twitter that is different from Facebook that is very valuable,” said Ernst. “And I think Snapchat is a much more visual medium. Maybe it’ll be procedures or demonstrations [that we show]. We’re still thinking about that.”