Dr. Niran Argintaru was in the middle of his shift at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto when a patient who had experienced a brief loss of consciousness was brought into the emergency room. A junior resident he was supervising reviewed the patient’s electrocardiogram (ECG) to rule out a cardiac cause.
“She brought me the ECG and told me, ‘It looks OK.’ But when I asked her what she was looking for, she only knew a few things,” says Argintaru, a senior resident at the University of Toronto. “I took out my phone and went on (the website) Life in the Fast Lane, I showed her some ECGs of stuff that you don’t want to miss.”
Like thousands of other doctors around the world, Argintaru, 30, uses Free Open Access Meducation (FOAM) to teach residents and to keep his own medical knowledge up to date.
“I never carry a book with me,” he says. “All of this stuff is available for free, and it’s in the palm of my hands.”
FOAM is not a single website, nor is it just a podium for broadcasting anecdotes or opinions. It is a community for sharing medical knowledge openly, and distilling peer-reviewed research into digestible, bite-sized points. The information is shared freely on Twitter, podcasts, blogs and other platforms under the hashtag #FOAMed.
It’s changing the nature of medical education, as students and professionals gain access to the latest research at a rapid pace. But some educators are concerned about the consequences of relying on unregulated online information.
“The textbooks can no longer keep up with the information cycle or the technology cycle,” says Dr. Sara Gray, an emergency and critical care specialist at St. Michael’s Hospital and associate professor at the University of Toronto. “The answer that was right two years ago is no longer necessarily the right answer today, and that rate of change makes it very hard for everybody to agree on how exactly we should be practicing at any given moment.”