One of the best reasons to be an emergency medicine provider on Twitter is to easily keep up with what’s happening at top conferences all around the world in real time. March and April 2014 were incredibly active, with tons of live tweeting from several major conferences. This month, I’ll run through highlights from five of the top EM-related conferences. Sure, reading the tweets tagged with these hashtags on Twitter is not quite as good as attending the conferences in person, but it’s amazing how much we can glean from these tweets, and they just might inspire you to go in person in the future. So on behalf of the tens of thousands of people who benefited from these tweets, I’d like to thank my fellow live-tweeters! If you want to know which conferences are coming up, check out Symplur’s health care hashtags page (www.symplur.com/healthcare-hashtags). It lets you know what conferences are coming down the pike and which hashtags to search for on Twitter. In a future column, I’ll give tips and links to resources that can help you become an effective conference live-tweeter.

1. Only in its second year, the Social Media and Critical Care (SMACC) conference (this year held in Gold Coast Australia, thus #smaccgold) attracted 1,300 attendees but created millions of impressions on Twitter. (Disclaimer: I was an unpaid lecturer about how EM providers can best use social media.) While its name makes it sound like a conference about social media, it is actually a conference of cutting-edge critical care junkies who happen to use social media to help spread new ideas like wildfire. Scott Weingart, MD, has called SMACC “the best critical care conference…ever.” Unsurprisingly, the number of tweets tagged #smaccgold was in excess of 28,000 during March alone. These were high-yield clinical pearls, links, and often live debates and conversations about the hottest topics being discussed at the conference, including resuscitation team dynamics, palliative care, and stress-inoculation training for residents. Here are some highlights. From UK-based EM physician Richard Body, MBChB (@richardbody): “I love this simple pearl from Victoria Brazil (@SocraticEM): Door-to-balloon times for STEMI halved by building relationships with the Cath Lab. #SmaccGOLD.” From REBEL-EM blog creator Salim Rezaie, MD (@srrezaie), “Palliation of dyspnea in advanced COPD: revisiting a role for opioids, http://t.co/zIIasrju7d #FOAMed #smaccgold” links to a BMJ article on this ever-changing topic. For stress inoculation in residency training, to whom else can we turn other than my own attending, Dr. Weingart (@emcrit)? He tweeted, “If my residents don’t feel like they are being shot at, I have failed.” Mission accomplished.