Dr. Milne’s popular Skeptics Guide to Emergency Medicine (@theSGEM) recently joined the online journal club party, partnering with the Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine and Academic Emergency Medicine. His new series “SGEM Hot Off the Press,” or “SGEM-HOP,” makes a reality of Dr. Milne’s dream to shorten the window between knowledge acquisition and clinical application from longer than a decade to less than one year. But Dr. Milne is taking it even further. In this series, he interviews the lead author of a brand-new paper the same week it is published. Though Dr. Milne is the archetypal polite Canadian gentleman, he isn’t afraid to ask authors tough questions.

His goal is that people not only keep up to date with the literature but that they scrutinize it and form their own opinions. After the interview is published on his podcast, comments from the FOAM world are invited. The best of these comments are then published in the print versions of these top journals. So, yes, you can tweet your way into a top journal.

Meanwhile, the so-called “flipped classroom” model of learning is making waves in the academic world. In my institution, our journal club has been combined with FOAM. We now not only read new or controversial papers, we pair them with relevant blog posts and listen to podcasts about the articles. Then we discuss the articles as well as criticism and insights from top commentators. This elevates the discussion and is another example of the merging of FOAM and classic learning modalities.

One resource that can be helpful is FOAMbase.org, a website by my co-resident Ben Azan, MD (@BenAzan), that categorizes FOAM publications by topic. FOAMbase is a great resource to quickly find high-quality FOAM that may be relevant to the paper being discussed in the journal club.

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.