A colloquio con John Mandrola, Louisville Cardiology Group, St. Matthews, Kentucky, USA

Are social media really useful for cardiologists?

Social media is becoming more important for cardiologists. So much of cardiology in heart disease is lifestyle-related and we really can use social media as an important tool to get this message out. Just the fact that I’m a regular doctor, I’m nobody, I’m just a doctor and decided to go into the public space with a voice, and now I have a bigger voice and I’m sort of a proof of the concept that social media can work. This morning I looked at the tweet from this position blog called Life in the fastlane. They have something like 450.000 page used a month and they’re just regular doctors who are writing information. So the platform, the normal structure that you have to be a distinguished professor and ask permission to get out there, has all been changed by social media and I think it’s wonderful. I think the more information out there, the better.

I think that social media makes this Congress [ESC 2015, n.d.r.] even more enjoyable and I keep my Twitter feed open, every morning it’s the first thing I look at. Because it’s social! Why is Facebook so powerful? Facebook is powerful because it’s social and it’s what we’re interested in, and it’s the same thing with social media. Cardiologists ask me “Where do I get my information?” and they think I’ll say Circulation, or JACC, or whatever, but where I can get the most of my information is Twitter. I hire about 400 people who I follow and they bring me the information that I want. So I follow Echo and EP people, pharmacologists, statisticians and I keep them in a column and they bring the information to me. It is my filter bubble, it’s my filter. We all have this information overload, it’s everywhere, so Twitter allows me to filter all the information to what I want.