ACS Bulletin - April 2015

60 |

Open community
Percent of
benchmark achieved
in last quarter 2014

Electronic health/medical records 1,418.6

History of Surgery 418.3

Rural Surgery 392.1

Colon and Rectal Surgery 342.2

West Virginia Chapter 134.1

Pediatric Surgery 119.9

General Surgery 106.8

Breast Surgery 94.2

Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery 64. 5

International Surgery 59. 7

*When benchmark of 60 posts per 1,000 members per quarter is used to measure engagement

quotes and comments from the presentations, particularly about controversial and stimulating topics. In terms of year-round Twitter use, the College’s social media team receives more tweet requests from staff than ever, as ACS employees have increasingly come to view Twitter as a way to get their messages out more quickly to the nearly 20,000 people and organizations that follow the College.

The College also uses YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+ with greater frequency. On LinkedIn, the College posts videos of staff members on its careers page to let job seekers know firsthand what it’s like to work at the College. In early 2015, the College began using promoted posts on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to tout the many reasons why becoming a member of the ACS benefits a surgical career. (See Figure 1, page 59.)

ACS Communities

ACS Communities, the College’s state-of-the-art online community platform, launched in July 2014, when its first community became available to members. As of February 2015, the platform had grown to 92 communities covering a variety of member surgeon interest areas. Of these,

51 communities are open, meaning that any member of the College may join. (Closed communities exist primarily to provide online work forums for ACS leadership groups, such as the Board of Governors and the Advisory Councils.)

ACS Governor Tyler Hughes, MD, FACS, serves as the Medical Editor of ACS Communities.

The number of surgeons
who use ACS Communities has
increased, as well. In terms of
website pages viewed, number
of items recommended by
visitors, and unique contributors,
January was the biggest month
yet for the platform. The site
has already received more than

560,000 pages views since the first community launched.

The substantial number of posts by busy practicing surgeons and leaders of the College indicates that members have much to discuss with each other.

Topics vary from case discussions to Maintenance of Certification to electronic medical records to issues regarding the everyday practice of surgery. Recent hot topics include physician burnout (multiple communities), contract negotiation (Young Fellows), axillary dissection (Breast Surgery), career detours (Women Surgeons), centers of excellence and redo for anastomotic stricture (Colon and Rectal Surgery), and when to operate for chronic abdominal pain (Rural Surgery).

To search for information on any topic, simply log in to ACS Communities and use the search box on the home page. Results can be sorted alphabetically, by date, or by relevance.