Frequently Asked Questions

FOAM or FOAMed stands for Free Open Access Medical education. It is content created by a community of clinicians dedicated to the dissemination of free, quality medical information.

The term was coined at a conference in Ireland in June 2012. In less than a decade, FOAM became a powerful resource for the medical community. It's even become a community of its own, with FOAM content creators and sharers working together to put the information to good use.

You've probably encountered FOAM through medical websites, blogs and podcasts. If you're an avid Twitter user, you're likely seen the #FOAMed hashtag, along with similar tags like #FOAMems, #FOAMtox, etc.

FOAMFinder scans respected and reliable sources for new FOAM content and pulls it into customizable feeds that you can use to keep up with developments in medical thinking.

The content in FOAMFinder is collected from over 100 RSS feeds of FOAM websites/blogs in over a dozen countries and searching Twitter for specific hashtags. We rely on the FOAMfinder community to share and upvote results that they find most relevant to them. By sharing and upvoting content, it will rise higher in the rankings in the feeds.

Feeds: The easiest way is to set up custom feeds. Enter your criteria into the search bar (e.g., Emergency Medicine, EMS, Resuscitation). Then click the green "Save as Feed" link that appears in the left column. Saved feeds are stored in your account and you can check them every time you log in.

Interests: In "My Account" you can choose Interests to help us personalize your results. If you choose no interests your account will default to all interests. The more interests you choose the more results you will get in each search.

In your saved feeds you can adjust results using the relevancy slider at the top of the page.

FOAMfinder is updated 8-10 times per day through twitter searches and by updating RSS feeds.

This is a community and we rely on our users to help us to provide the best content. If you have a high-quality FOAM website or blog that is not included, please reach out to us via the Support > Contact Us link in the upper right-hand corner.

If you do not want to share your feeds, you can make all your feeds private in the My Account section of the site.

Yes! Next to any saved feed is the < / > symbol. Click on the symbol, copy the code, and embed on your website.

Sharing a piece of content is easy. From the results page, click on the Share button and choose your method of sharing. You can also share content while viewing it by using the share link at the top of the foam finder screen.

Help us build more relevant content by tagging quality content with keywords. This will help the greater community find content on specific tags.

Watch for future releases that will allow you to create feeds based on your tags!

Here are a few suggestions for using FOAM in education:

• Curate topical feeds and add the links to your LMS when you're covering that topic. Assign articles or podcasts as homework.
• When you find a particularly interesting article, provide it to your students as a handout or share it with them through FOAMFinder and discuss in the next class.
• Help instill curiosity and love of learning in your students by talking about FOAM in class and encouraging them to find FOAM resources to aid their studies.
• FOAM is still fallible and requires critical thinking. Teach your classes how to evaluate FOAM content and sources for credibility and accuracy.

It is expensive to build the #FOAMFinder this community deserves. Sponsors are companies who 1) value and respect the #FOAMed community and 2) have a product or products they want to share with you. We limit the number of sponsors and made ads minimally intrusive while still respecting the sponsor's support.

Funds received from sponsors go directly to the creation and ongoing improvements and maintenance of #FOAMFinder.

No. Absolutely not. Not now. Not ever.