The Thoracic Surgery Social Media Network (@tssmn) is an initiative of a group of Cardiothoracic surgeons in cooperation with two major US journals for that specialty: The Annals of Thoracic Surgery (Annals) and The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery (JTCVS). The purpose of this app is to enhance the ability for readers of those journals to submit tweets about interesting articles published in the Annals and JTCVS. In this way we hope to initiate a social media conversation to engender a thoughtful interchange of ideas and opinions. This software will present the user with the current Annals and JTCVS editions along with a summary or abstract of the published, peer-reviewed articles.

The intended audience for this conversation consists of both peers and colleagues and also the lay public. Ten members of the @tssmn will initiate monthly tweets when new articles are published in the fields of Adult Cardiac Surgery, Congenital Cardiac Surgery, and General Thoracic Surgery. The tweets will contain the direct links to the articles. However, for full text access, the reader will need a subscription or a proxy subscription through an academic institution to gain access to more than the article abstract.

We hope to engage the professional and lay public, and we hope that this social media experiment will generate a lively and ongoing discussion about interesting Cardiothoracic surgical topics.

The users of this app must be reminded that medicine and surgery are not exact sciences, that medical conditions vary from person to person, and that health care decisions are to be made by the patients, their families, and their health care providers. This app is only an educational tool and is not to be used for specific medical conditions.