This year, for the first time ever, ACEP assembled an official social media all-star team for the sole purpose of helping people all over the world keep up with the very latest from the 2014 Scientific Assembly in Chicago. The results are in: not only was ACEP14 a record breaking year for in-person attendees, with more than 6,500 registrants, we also shattered all of our previous online metrics.

For the most part, my fellow #ACEP14 social media team members took to Twitter. This year, around 2,400 people tweeted with the hashtag #ACEP14 in the month surrounding the conference, up from 1,500 last year, and approximately 325 in 2012. There were more than 18,000 tweets from or about #ACEP14, up from 12,000 last year and 1,700 in 2012—which seems almost cute in retrospect. It’s clear that the way we attend conferences is changing before our very eyes.

Also, for the first time we added a podcast to the social media mix. My FOAMcast (@FOAMpodcast) co-host Lauren Westafer, DO (@LWestafer), and I recorded (and edited—whew!) four daily roundups on location from Chicago, in which we covered highlights from the day’s top sessions and announcements, ranging from top pearls, controversies, and the welcome five new additions to ACEP’s Choosing Wisely list. Our 10 minute episodes proved to be quite popular, with thousands of daily downloads. So, we’ll be back next year! Meanwhile, like our regular FOAMcast episodes, they are available for free on iTunes and on our blog, www.foamcast.org.

Here some top tweets from #ACEP14. On Monday, I cruised some of the biggest and most packed sessions. Costa Rican emergency physician, Manrique Umana, MD (@UmanaMD), was at the Monday cardiology update talk by Corey Slovis, MD, FACEP, and tweeted “Slovis: 10-30% of non-STEMI’s have a fresh clot. ‘Hypothermia+cathlab’ stat post-arrest is the way to go!”

Bob Stuntz, MD, FACEP (@BobStuntz), kept up with a talk by Scott Weingart, MD, FACEP (@emcrit), titled “Save the Blade!” on avoiding intubation. Among his best: “Weingart: Lower esophageal sphincter opens at 22-23cm H2O, so keep NIV [non-invasive ventilation] pressures 15-20.”

Since Ebola is all over the news, I would be remiss not to mention the lecture by David Pigott, MD, FACEP, titled “Inside the Hot Zone: Highly Infectious Pathogens in the ED.” Official #ACEP14 social media team member Allen Roberts, MD, FACEP (@GruntDoc), tweeted that when treating Ebola, expect “5-10 liters of GI losses [per day] with lyte disturbance.” He also tweeted about the Food and Drug Administration’s support of compassionate use for unapproved therapies.

On Tuesday, I focused in on tweets coming from smaller sessions and some of the outstanding niches within emergency medicine. From Rajesh Geria, MD, FACEP (@GeriaSonoMD), past chair of the ACEP Ultrasound Section: “ACEP policy statement: Ultrasound is NOT an extension of the physical exam. It is a diagnostic test.” This is an important point from the perspective of billing, as well as the development of core skills that can help our patients.

Social media team member Dr. Westafer reported from the end-of-life talk by James Adams, MD, FACEP, “Words matter. Palliative medicine=intensive [medicine]. Doesn’t have to take much time.”

And the always pearl-packed @LasVegasEM sent out this nifty tidbit that may come in handy on an upcoming shift: “Tooth avulsion and don’t know where it went? Rule out aspiration and consider a chest x-ray.”

But any ACEP conference would feel incomplete without a hearty dose of research reviews from the past year courtesy of the dynamic duo of Jerry Hoffman, MD, and Rick Bukata, MD. This year, someone finally gave them a much-deserved celebrity-mashup name, which in hindsight seems long overdue. Ladies and gentlemen: #Hofkata. While it hasn’t picked up like #Rosenalli just yet (that’s the amalgam Rosen and Tintinalli that we use on FOAMcast), it looks to be on its way. In the meantime, for my money, the #Hofkata tweet of the week came on Wednesday from EM physician assistant Patrick Bafuma (@EMinFocus) who relayed a nice editorial on “guideline fatigue” from the British Medical Journal in 2012: “Guidelines harm patients too. BMJ. April 2012 [http://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.e2685]. Yep, sums it up well. #HofKata ‪#ACEP14.” But they also hit on some bread-and-butter studies including support for tranexamic acid for anterior epistaxis, the uselessness of cough medicines, and the importance of not over-testing in the emergency department. In other words, vintage #HofKata.

In case you missed any or all of what happened at ACEP14 in Chicago, many of the tweets are still searchable on Twitter under the #ACEP14 hashtag, and an even more exhaustive compendium can be found by searching the hashtag on symplur.com. Thanks to my #ACEP14 official social media teammates Salim Rezaie, MD, FACEP (@srrezaie), Ryan Radecki, MD (@emlitofnote), Jason Nomura, MD, FACEP (@Takeokun), Lauren Westafer, DO (@LWestafer), Seth Trueger, MD (@MDAware), and Allen Roberts, MD, FACEP (@GruntDoc) for great coverage. We’ll see you next year in Boston. Or in about two minutes online.

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.