Medical Content Creation: What’s My Story?

These days, most people think of social media when it comes to the term, “content creation”. However, content creation involves many different mediums. Social media is just another platform to present and communicate information to people. My content creation, in medicine, began long before I stepped into the social media arena.

As a pediatric resident, I created a “case of the week” series for my co-residents. It involved me producing a patient case with a stock photo of a physical finding of the disease presented in the case, putting it all together on a single sheet of paper, and hanging it on a poster board. The pediatric residents would submit their answers to see if they could identify the case diagnosis. The following week, I would post another piece of paper on the poster board with the correct diagnosis and a brief explanation about the disease entity. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was creating content! Over the years that followed, I published interesting cases, engaged in research and published my findings in journals and presented at medical conferences, wrote a couple book chapters in medical texts, and even helped consult on medical content for television. Being a part of academic institutions, I was engaged in teaching at all levels of medical trainees, from pediatric residents and pediatric critical care fellows to nurses and nurse practitioner students. All the while, the terminology of “medical content” did not come to my mind. In my world, I was just contributing to education and the medical literature.

It wasn’t until I became involved in social media, that the idea of medical content creation crystallized in my mind. There were two distinct events that started me down the path of truly understanding the importance of content creation. I wasn’t a big social media participant in the beginning. In 2011, I created a profile on LinkedIn, more through peer influence and not actual interest. I really didn’t use it for anything other than to organize my resume and work-related information. I wasn’t involved in any other social media platform at the time. When my wife and I started a business and I was selected to be a panelist on a YouTube video series, my foray into social media and, subsequently, medical content creation began.

In 2015, my wife and I opened a pediatric urgent care clinic in our community. While I worked as the medical director and focused on the medical details of the clinic, my wife had more vision and saw that we needed to be “seen” to continue to stay open. Just hanging a medical diploma on the wall and opening a clinic didn’t guarantee business. The community needed to know that we existed! So, my wife worked diligently on Facebook and we worked with a website/social media consultant to help with other social media platforms to gain a presence in the online community. I saw how online representation helped our business. So, I explored some of our platforms and saw that our consultant had not generated a very active Twitter presence. In 2018, I decided to take over the Twitter account, on behalf of the clinic, and started learning about social media. In 2020, I enrolled in a SoMeDocs masterclass on social media for physicians. The course really opened my eyes to the world of social media from a medical perspective. After gaining experience with Twitter and learning about social media from other physicians, I created accounts on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, and Medium. I learned how to create various forms of medical content and repurpose it for the different platform styles. As my communication and educational approach evolved, I started writing some opinion/editorial pieces for online journals and, subsequently, started my own blog, “Epstein’s Pearls”. Finally, it all came together into a centralized website to represent my own personal brand.

The second milestone event was being selected to be on a panel discussion on a YouTube episode of “Middle Ground”, created by Jubilee Media. One of the producers found me through our clinic website online and reached out to me to see if I would be interested in participating. The topic was vaccines and involved a discussion between those who were proponents of vaccines and those who were not. As a pediatric intensivist, dealing with critically ill children in the intensive care unit, I dealt with vaccine preventable diseases. I was a bit naive about vaccines and really didn’t realize or understand the societal conflict associated with them. I always took it for granted that parents vaccinated their kids against the horrible vaccine preventable diseases that I was seeing in the pediatric intensive care unit. I was not a primary pediatrician and did not encounter day-to-day battles with vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaccine attitudes. However, the discussion on that panel made me realize that there was a real problem with misinformation and anti-science thinking. The popularity of the video, and the comments on it, really emphasized the extent of the problem and generated a big “why” for me. This prompted me to throw my hat into the ring of social media. Creating medical content that was accurate and useful for the public and combating medical misinformation and disinformation became my area of concentration and my “why”. This watershed event made me realize that I wanted and needed to create medical content for the general public and not just the medical community.

I’ve learned a lot about creating medical content over the years in different formats and using different platforms. This series is a product of my “why”. My goal is to help teach others in the medical field how to generate medical content. The more the medical field understands how to create medical content online and communicate it appropriately, the more of an impact the medical community will have in relaying accurate and reliable information for all those who seek it in our digital age.

What is your story? How did you get involved in producing online content?