At year 10, competitive NephMadness still delivers winners to the hoop
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Duke University nephrologist Matthew Sparks, MD, spends most of his day training fellows about evaluating and diagnosing kidney disease.
When March 1 arrives, his schedule will get more crowded.
For the next 25 days, he will be immersed in “NephMadness,” a competition he created with fellow college basketball fan Joel Topf, MD, that pits teams against each other on important topics in nephrology.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the competition.
“We developed it as a way to help fellows learn about and debate current concepts that were challenging or confusing, or we just needed to debate [the topic] because we weren’t sure what the answers were,” Sparks told Healio | Nephrology.
Learning initiative
NephMadness started in March 2013 as a social media education project of the American Journal of Kidney Diseases blog. It is a “learning initiative that leverages the tools of social media to teach about the latest and greatest breakthroughs in the field of nephrology,” according to the NephMadness website.
Expanding that knowledge base is crucial to attract more fellows to nephrology, Sparks and Topf said.
“The specialty of nephrology is facing an identity crisis. Applications to fellowship programs are declining, leaving even well-established programs unable to fill allotted positions,” according to the website. “Further threatening the specialty is loss of expertise as aspects of nephrology practice are being absorbed by hospitalists, intensivists, rheumatologists, interventional radiologists and cardiologists.
“Challenging these trends will require creativity and new approaches. A goal of these new approaches should be highlighting the diversity and positive attributes of nephrology practice in order to stimulate interest in the field while teaching cutting-edge concepts, while having fun.”
The competition is based on March Madness, the annual U.S. college basketball tournament of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. NephMadness replaces the usual field of basketball teams in March Madness with concepts in nephrology, arranged into a tournament bracket. The 32 teams/concepts are progressively narrowed, in kidney terms, to the “Saturated 16,” the “Effluent 8,” the “Filtered 4,” the “Left and Right Kidney, and ultimately a champion.
As the tournament advances, NephMadness bloggers play the role of tournament analysts, reviewing strengths and limitations of the winners and losers, explaining forthcoming topics, and generating enthusiasm.
Each of the 32 concepts is described in short, fully referenced, entries written by guest authors who are experts in the profession. As concepts successfully survive early challenges and advance through the brackets, additional posts highlight nuances of the topic, newer data and alternative viewpoints.
There are eight main nephrology topics, or regions, with four subtopics, or teams, in the tournament. The topics include areas such as anemia, artificial kidney, COVID-19, primary care and workforce.
“The excitement of that whole month of NCAA basketball – the Sweet 16, the Final Four – made us think this would be a great way to share the excitement for the [nephrology] field, which we thought was unnecessarily getting beaten up for not being exciting,” Sparks said.
“Nobody has picked up on this month-long campaign that reaches across blogs and social media,” Topf told Healio | Nephrology. “It still stands alone.”
- Reference:
- https://ajkdblog.org/2021/03/01/welcome-to-nephmadness-2021/amp/ For more information:
- Matthew Sparks, MD, is a physician-scientist in the Division of Nephrology at the Duke University School of Medicine and the Durham VA Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina. He can be reached at matthew.sparks@duke.edu. Twitter: @Nephro_Sparks
- Joel Topf, MD, is the medical director of St. Clair Nephrology Research in Roseville, Michigan. He can be reached at joel.topf@gmail.com. Twitter: @kidney_boy
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