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Letter
Professional use of Twitter for drug information
  1. Juan-Carlos Juárez-Giménez1,
  2. Cristina Puyal-González2,
  3. Ariadna Pérez-Ricart3,
  4. Pilar Lalueza-Broto3,
  5. Lourdes Girona-Brumos3
  1. 1Drug Information Centre Pharmacy, Hospital Universitari Vall d’Hebron, Barcelona, Spain
  2. 2Department of Medical Library, Hospital Universitari Vall d’Hebron, Barcelona, Spain
  3. 3Department of Pharmacy, Hospital Universitari Vall d’Hebron, Barcelona, Spain
  1. Correspondence to J-C Juárez-Giménez, Drug Information Centre Pharmacy, Hospital Universitari Vall d’Hebron, Passeig de la Vall d’Hebron, 119, 08035, Barcelona, Spain; jcjuarez{at}vhebron.net

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Web 2.0 services or social media are transforming the pathways health professionals use to communicate among themselves and with their patients. The application of these tools by physicians has grown. Recent proof of this fact is the policy published by the American Medical Association about professionalism and the use of social media.1 The evidence of such Web 2.0 services' adoption by pharmacists is limited, but blogs have been used for discussion of pharmacological therapies.2 Twitter, a free social networking and microblogging site, has shown its strength in broadcasting information. This tool allows users to post messages (tweets) with a maximum of 140 characters, which often contain links to websites with interesting issues, blog posts or videos, and users can click on their topics of interest.3 Not only can they follow other people's tweets but also, through a process called retweeting, they can rebroadcast another user's tweet with a click. As a consequence, tweets can spread rapidly and exponentially through a growing community of more than 200 million users worldwide.

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Footnotes

  • Competing interests None.

  • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.