Ethical Standards for Cardiothoracic Surgeons’ Participation in Social Media

Social media offers enormous potential benefits for both care providers and patients, because the platform allows for the dissemination and gathering of information and has the innate ability to network globally. The Cardiothoracic (CT) Ethics Forum functions as the ethics educational arm for the CT surgical community, producing ethics-related programs at major CT surgery meetings and subsequently publishing articles on those proceedings as well as ethical topics in CT surgical and other medical specialty journals. The Forum has constructed a very important and useful set of recommendations for CT surgeons as they engage with social media.