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Sunday, April 13, 2014

#NephMadness 2014- the aftermath

The contributors of eAJKD, the official blog of the American Journal of Kidney Diseases,
experimented again this year with the same concept of March madness- called Nephmadness.  The goal was to create a game online to increase interest in nephrology. Starting on selection Sunday to April 8th, this contest exposed the novel concepts in nephrology to many readers of social media and non social media in nephrology. 
are experimenting with a novel application of social media in medical education.

In Dec 2013, Joel Topf proposed to redo the magic he had proposed in 2013. He asked Matt Sparks and myself to see if were ready for this. But this year, we thought big and broader. With the help of eAJKD and AJKD staff, the www.nephmadness.com was created.  Following that, brackets were designed and professional look to it enhanced its appeal compared to last year’s version.  Time crunch to write posts and educational material began end of Feb 2014 till selection Sunday. Meanwhile, selecting bracket leaders and content experts was a fun and fulfilling task.  It branded Nephmadness to a different level.  Once the posts were in, editing was performed by content experts and we were all set for Selection Sunday.  The games began after that and Joel’s summary on this can be found here. 
            We hope this game enticed fellows, residents and medical students to understand nephrology better and appreciate its importance in medicine. While the game was a success from a numerical standpoint compared to last year( 260 participants from around the world), we yet don’t know if it did what we intended it to do.. educate and create interest in nephrology? Perhaps it did ?  What we know is that there was a domino effect. The amount of posts on the topic in the social media world was far more than last year and interest in learning about this from non nephrologists was intriguing. 

This year we also had involved content experts to edit the posts and contents under their expertise making it more peer review quality.
However, in NephMadness, the teams are nephrology concepts. The field is divided into eight regions, each with a content expert:
§  Regeneration: Stuart Shankland
§  Acute kidney injury: Sarah Faubel
§  Electrolytes: Helbert Rondon
§  Kidney Stones: David Goldfarb
§  Biologics: Jonathan Hogan
§  Toxins: Warren Kupin
§  Hypertension: George Bakris
§  Renal replacement therapy: Glenn Chertow

This year, Joel Topf and Matt Sparks took off with a bang and two new members Warren Kupin and Edgar Lerma joined us in this momentous effort.


When you google “ Nephmadness 2014” the following posts on this topic appear

1.    KevinMd.com
2.    Renal fellow network parts 1-8 on their reviews.
3.    Duke University promoting it.
4.    Pro Med Network
6.    Flume cast
8.    MedPage today


Personally, I couldn’t find anything to this caliber ever done in Nephrology, not alone in Medicine!  For many things nephrologists have been the first to do—look at uptodate.com and who founded that.  I am glad and happy to be part of the Nephmadness team and hope folks learned while they played along.

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