Point of Care Ultrasound Training in Nephrology: Twitter Poll as a Modern Tool for Development of an Effective...

Point of care ultrasonography (POCUS) is being increasingly recognized as an adjunct to physical examination in the field of nephrology. However, paucity of trained faculty and standardized curricula remain key barriers to widespread adoption of this skill as well as development of reliable quality assessment programs at the institutional level. Herein, we sought to explore the utility of Twitter polls to gain insights into knowledge deficits of the learners for making curricular improvements while simultaneously disseminating POCUS pearls and pitfalls.

A series of 57 single-question polls were tweeted over a 12-month period, each containing an ultrasound image or a video asking for correct interpretation. These were sent out from the Twitter handle of NephroPOCUS.com (@NephroP), an online POCUS education tool. The answer and a brief explanation were shared in a subsequent tweet at the end of the voting period. Information on the percentage of correct answers, Tweet impressions, and engagements was collected and analyzed by the pre-determined difficulty level (I-III) and the organ/learning objective being tested.

The number of responses per poll was 228 ± 94.6 (mean ± SD), and the percentage of correct responses was 57.9 ± 17.5 (mean ± SD). 16 (of 57) polls received less than 50% correct responses, of which 8 belonged to level III difficulty. The learning objectives that received the least number of correct responses in the kidney, cardiac, lung, vascular, and other categories were identification of end-stage kidney (16.2% correct answers), right pleural effusion on the parasternal short axis view of the heart (29%), right pleural effusion from the subxiphoid window (39%), grading of systemic venous congestion (27.3%), and identification of ascites on the right lateral chest window (15%), respectively. The overall engagement rate was 6.96%, which was above the median for health and higher education-related tweets on Twitter. Targeted didactic material was developed based on these results, published on various open-access nephrology education platforms.

Twitter polls aid in identifying the knowledge gaps among POCUS learners. Information obtained from the polls can be used to improve POCUS-related curricula and develop targeted educational material to facilitate remote learning.