The most common question I am asked about Free Open Access Medical Education (FOAM) is, “Do I have to be on Twitter?” The answer I give is, “No, but you should be.” But for some, the format doesn’t mesh for them. Some people just want links to high-quality FOAM content without having to sift through comments and opinions regardless of how expert they may be. Here are a few great ways to do this. For other suggestions, check out Thoma et al in the October 2014 Annals of Emergency Medicine.¹

1 Search by topic using a FOAM-only search engine. Generally, Googling a topic itself is far too clumsy if you are looking for good resources on a particular topic. (Go ahead—I dare you to try a few topics; some work reasonably well, and some don’t.) Try GoogleFOAM.com. This will bring up only FOAM resources on any topic.

2 Consume only the latest and greatest content curated by a trusted source. At the moment, the Life in the Fastlane Review is the most trusted and utilized. Their weekly reviews promise “the very best of global #FOAMed emergency medicine and critical care education.” It sounds Paleolithic, but you can actually sign up for email notifications so that when the latest review comes out, you get a good, old-fashioned email, if email is your thing.

3 Instead of searching out individual FOAM websites, use Rich Site Summary (RSS) feed, which syndicates many different websites into one feed—the way a TV channel creates a lineup from various shows. Feedly, for example, is both an app and a website that brings you a feed of only the content you want. If you wanted nothing but FOAM, you could subscribe only to “FOAM EM,” and you would always know what’s going on. You can also subscribe to some peer-reviewed journals. One strength of Feedly is that you can tag any post as “save for later,” and whenever you have time, you can check your saved file and find a slew of interesting content you’d been meaning to consume. It’s a lot less clunky than emailing links or files to yourself or saving them on your computer, that is unless you have a pristinely organized system for that sort of thing. I do not.

4 Visit a FOAM database such as FOAMbase.org (which I have mentioned in “The Feed” previously). FOAMbase, created by my coresident Ben Azan, MD, has two especially useful features. The first is a table of contents of FOAM resources organized by category. Looking for FOAM on pediatrics or neurology or procedures? Those resources are all in one place. The other great feature of FOAMbase is that takes what Feedly does and adds a social dimension to it. Anyone can submit a new FOAM resource along with a brief description of the content, and others can comment and up or down vote on the quality of the content.

5 Finally, there’s Reddit.com. I resisted checking out Reddit for the longest time, but I finally caved. Verdict: it’s good once optimized for our purposes. Reddit is actually quite similar to FOAMbase once you’ve set it up. For better or worse, there is a ton of other content on Reddit, and unfortunately, by default that content is thrust upon you when you first join (and it is pretty terrible content at that). In fact, if you make a Reddit account, the first thing you will want to do is find the “edit” button, find “my subreddits,” and unsubscribe from everything that you were automatically subscribed to. After that, you can search for FOAMed (www.reddit.com/r/foamed) and subscribe only to it. Once you’ve done that, you will have created a beautiful haven of FOAM-only links similar to Feedly and FOAMbase. The links in the FOAMed subreddit are only ones that other users have actively added to the feed. That’s unlike Feedly, which incorporates new FOAMed posts automatically regardless of the quality. Like FOAMbase, you can easily add suggestions of your own, and you can easily promote your own FOAM if you are trying to get the word out on your new blog or podcast. Both FOAMbase and Reddit have comment sections, though these are currently fairly quiet.

So there you have it: five ways to find great FOAM content without—perish the thought—having to be on Twitter.

Dr. Faust is an emergency-medicine resident at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens. He tweets about #FOAMed and classical music @jeremyfaust.

Reference

1. Thoma B, Joshi N, Trueger NS, et al. Five strategies to effectively use online resources in emergency medicine. Ann Emerg Med. 2014;64:392-395.