Virally Training the Next Generation of Informaticians
The adoption of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in 2009 and specifically the inclusion of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) spurred the rapid implementation of electronic health records (EHR) around the nation (Kannry et al., 2016; Steckler, Brownlee, Urick, & Farley, 2017). Consequently, this generated a great demand for informatics pharmacists and despite a surplus in the pharmacy workforce as a whole, a shortage of informatics pharmacists was predicted by hospital and health system pharmacy leaders (Carmichael et al., 2013). In a recent 2017 commentary by Flynn and colleagues, they estimated the demand for informatics pharmacists will be short by a factor of four to twelve over the next ten years (Flynn, Fox, Clauson, Seaton, & Breeden, 2017). Moreover, there is a consensus that informatics training, especially for pharmacy, is severely lacking and very much needed (Carmichael et al., 2013; Flynn et al., 2017; Kannry et al., 2016; Steckler et al., 2017). The issue further trickles down to pharmacy students, in which less than 50% of pharmacy schools even have a didactic component on pharmacy informatics despite being part of the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (Steckler et al., 2017). Most importantly, implementation of health information technology is complex and when these projects are carried out by undertrained individuals, it may lead to unintended consequences and patient harm (Kannry et al., 2016; Steckler et al., 2017). Lastly, education around pharmacy informatics is not just for informatics pharmacists, but all healthcare professionals as health information technology becomes the standard platform in which all healthcare providers practice (Flynn et al., 2017; Steckler et al., 2017).
To stimulate the development pipeline of pharmacy informaticians, it’s important to understand the target demographics. These individuals would predominantly include pre-pharmacy students, current pharmacy students, pharmacy residents, pharmacy fellows, and practicing pharmacists. After high school, the typical training pathway is between six to eight years until graduation from pharmacy school with another two to four years for post-graduate training. This would effectively place the target age of our campaign demographics between 18 to 30. Since individuals in this age group grew up in the digital age, campaigns that leverage the use of social media (e.g. Twitter, blogs, YouTube, Facebook) may be very effective in training and/or dissemination of information to aspiring healthcare providers (Hennessy, Kirkpatrick, Smith, & Border, 2016; John, Shelton, Lang, & Ingersoll, 2016; Ross & Myers, 2017). The goal of the Virally Training the Next Generation of Informaticians (VTNGI) campaign is to apply the use and gratifications theory to increase the exposure of individuals within the pharmacy community (i.e. students, residents, fellows, pharmacists) to pharmacy informatics videos on the social media platform, YouTube. An existing YouTube channel, ImproRx, already exists for this purpose but the social capital (e.g. views, subscribers counts, followers) is lacking to gain national traction and influence. The VTNGI campaign will build upon this existing channel by examining the various constructs of the use and gratifications theory and data analytics from the channel will be used to inform certain aspects of the campaign.
Uses and gratifications theory has been widely used to explain the impetus behind the use of media by consumers (Weaver Lariscy, Tinkham, & Sweetser, 2011). Essentially, the theory posits that media consumption by individuals are intentional for the purpose of fulfilling their needs and consequently their gratifications (Whiting & Williams, 2013). This is in contrast to the original theories about mass media communication of “what do the media do to people” and more along the lines of “what do people do with the media” (Katz, 1959). Thus, this is an “audience-driven approach” and the audience or consumer is the key to the success of this theory (Hanson & Haridakis, 2008). The conscious and intentional use of media by individuals based on social and psychological characteristics has been described to fall under five main categories: cognitive needs, affective needs, personal integrative needs, social integrative needs, and tension release needs (Katz, Gurevitch, & Haas, 1973).
Cognitive needs can be described as the desire to increase ones’ knowledge or information gathering. As the adoption and optimization of electronic health records continue to occur throughout the United States coupled with the saturation of the pharmacy job market and demand for pharmacy informatics – pharmacy students, residents, fellows, and current pharmacists will inevitably seek out information about this nascent field of pharmacy. Considering ‘information seeking’ accounted for 80% of respondent’s rationale for using social media (Whiting & Williams, 2013) and the fact that it was a significant predictor in viewing YouTube videos (Hanson & Haridakis, 2008), informational videos about pharmacy informatics will serve as the backbone of the VTNGI campaign. These informational videos should also be well-supported by evidence whenever possible as useful and efficacious content were more likely to be viewed and shared (Kim, 2015). In light of formalized didactic training in pharmacy schools for informatics, the informational videos should range from introductory videos targeted at students to advanced informatics concepts geared towards practicing pharmacists.
Affective needs pertain to satisfying the gamut of emotional desires (Katz et al., 1973). The VTNGI campaign will cater to this social construct by developing video content directed towards the successes and failures within pharmacy. Although this wouldn’t necessarily be directly related to pharmacy informatics, the videos will appeal to the happy and sad emotions that individuals within pharmacy go through. For example, a strong affective video would be one that discusses the emotions felt when not matching for a pharmacy residency. With the increasing demand for residency training pharmacists, which includes informatics pharmacists, pharmacy students will surely relate to the video content.
Personal integrative needs take on the approach of combining both cognitive and affective needs to build upon credibility and status (Katz et al., 1973). Themes involving population health informatics could be used to help build up the individuals’ self-esteem and assure them that the field contributes to something larger than themselves and has a major impact on the healthcare sector as a whole. The campaign will also aim to recruit well-established, informatics pharmacists to speak about their contribution to society and assure aspiring students that they are venturing down a field that is well-respected and has status. Certainly, videos that portray and affirm credibility can manifest in more sharing as individuals may do so due to interpersonal expression (Hanson & Haridakis, 2008).
Social integrative needs are best described as the need to socialize with family, friends, and others (Katz et al., 1973). Building upon this social construct, the VTNGI campaign will set standards to respond and interact with individuals through comments, messages, and likes through the YouTube platform in a timely fashion. To encourage additional engagement, live streams will be held on a weekly basis in an effort to further encourage engagement across individual consumers in addition to the campaign host. This would be similar to a chat room setting, but with VTNGI facilitating the discussion.
Lastly, tension release needs hinges on the desire to distance from self and escape from reality (Katz et al., 1973). In this vein, videos solely for entertainment, but related to pharmacy informatics, will be produced. For example, web conferencing and online messaging is frequently used in the daily work of informatics pharmacists due to the location of their physical offices and coverage of multiple hospitals and clinics. The videos could aim to entertain the individuals via comedy sketches that is meant to portray the common issues and problems that occur during the use of these communication tools. In one study, videos created for entertainment elicited a 64% response rate for why individuals chose to view the content (Whiting & Williams, 2013). Moreover, the use of comedy and leisure entertainment may lead to a higher likelihood that the YouTube videos are shared (Hanson & Haridakis, 2008).
Other overarching ideas to consider are count of total videos, age of videos, and social capital (Khan & Vong, 2014). In a study by Khan, both the total video count and age of a video were found to be inversely related to the virality of a YouTube video (Khan & Vong, 2014). This would suggest that videos produced by the VTNGI campaign should focus on quality over quantity. Additionally, videos created by the campaign should be checked frequently for potential updates and older videos should be promptly removed. The last idea, social capital, is predicated upon the relations of the actor and their interconnectedness within a network (e.g. FaceBook, YouTube, Twitter) (Khan & Vong, 2014). Since individuals with high social capital have a large number of followers on their respective platforms, the goal would be for the campaign to partner with those individuals and have them share the pharmacy informatics content in an effort to make it go viral (Khan & Vong, 2014).
The Virally Training the Next Generation of Informaticians campaign aims to streamline a scalable solution (i.e. YouTube videos) in an attempt to educate and train aspiring individuals who have an interest in pharmacy informatics. The campaign takes advantage of the widespread use of social media amongst the 18-30 age group and delivers this timely information when colleges of pharmacy around the United States are not providing sufficient informatics training. By applying the uses and gratifications theory towards the creation of YouTube videos for the VTNGI campaign, the likelihood of dispersing the information to the pharmacy community looks promising.
References
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