Abstract
Background: Sociopolitical issues such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and poverty pervade all aspects of society. Healthcare is not immune to these problems, and frequent inequities in health outcomes occur due to bias and unequal access to care.
Purpose: The goal of this project is to identify, analyze, and ultimately decrease instances of bias in healthcare through public interactive education.
Methods: The authors created a public account on Instagram with frequent posts detailing common examples of bias in the healthcare setting and proposing simple and implementable solutions. The page was also designed to accept submission from followers with examples of experienced biases in the healthcare setting for the authors to perform root cause analyses.
Results: Each post reached 46-105 different accounts in the first week after creation, and the page itself reached 518 accounts and had 160-260 interactions per post.
Discussion:. Young healthcare professionals often do not find the time to educate themselves about sociopolitical issues in the medical field. Using social media, however, we are able to incorporate education regarding these issues into their normal feed, providing concise graphics that allow for passive learning around these topics. This allows for easy accessibility and readability, and can provide a valuable tool for those in healthcare.
Conclusions: Using Instagram to educate on medical bias issues is a modern take on inequity improvement. The number of accounts reached within the first week indicate an interest in pages of this nature that ease of access and social media usage for medical education is a valuable methodology.
