Community Guidelines

Figure 1

Figure 1 is a network for social learning that is constantly growing because of the thoughtful contributions of healthcare professionals like you. When you contribute, you help educate the more than 3 million registered members around the world.


The following Community Guidelines are here to help you understand what it means to be a member of the Figure 1 community. Please be aware that all of your activity on Figure 1 is subject to these Guidelines and our Terms of Use. This includes your comments, clinical cases, and posts.

Respect the patients.

The patients featured on Figure 1 are real patients. These patients deserve to be treated with dignity and respect at all times. Apply the same ethical principles you use in your practice to what you share on Figure 1. Please don’t write anything on Figure 1 that you wouldn’t say in front of a patient.

Maintain patient privacy at all times.

When creating a clinical case, post or comment, you must never include identifying patient information. Please refer to our Content Policy for a list of identifiers. Any clinical case, post or comment that violates this policy will be removed. As outlined in our Terms of Use and FAQs, it is your responsibility to maintain patient privacy at all times.

When sharing a clinical case, only share your direct clinical experience.

Figure 1 clinical case sharing is intended for healthcare professionals to share clinical information about patients in their direct care. It is not intended for sharing your own medical conditions, those of your family or friends, or medical conditions outside the scope of your practice. This applies to clinical cases and comments on these cases.

Be kind to your fellow community members.

Figure 1 is a respectful learning environment where healthcare professionals from many different backgrounds and countries come together to share their knowledge and learn from one another. Do not share any comment on Figure 1 that is not conducive to maintaining a respectful learning environment. Bullying and harassment are not tolerated on Figure 1.

Keep comments professional.

When contributing your questions and feedback to the clinical dialogue on Figure 1, keep in mind that this is a professional environment. Insensitive, lewd, or otherwise unprofessional comments are not appropriate for this community and will be removed. If you wouldn’t say something in front of a patient, please don’t say it here.

Support your contributions with data.

While we recognize that not all treatments have been tested by clinical trials, clinical information and discussion on Figure 1 must have a scientific basis. Failure to provide sufficient support and data when requested may result in your clinical case or comment being removed.

Avoid sharing promotional content.

All activity on Figure 1 should serve the purpose of furthering medical knowledge. While healthcare professionals are welcome to tell the community about a project that they are working on, spamming the community with commercial or fundraising interests is not permitted. If your organization is interested in learning about promotional opportunities on Figure 1, please contact us and we will be happy to connect you to a member of our Business Development team.

Give credit where credit is due.

We encourage the sharing of helpful resources such as articles, news, peer-reviewed publications, etc., as long as they are relevant, publicly available, and cited accordingly.

If you’ve found value in a clinical case or an interactive piece of content on Figure 1, please use our built-in share function to send it to your colleagues and peers. Taking screenshots of a clinical case, comment, or any other contribution on Figure 1 and sharing them elsewhere, without crediting the source, is a violation of our Terms of Use.

Share content that is relevant to the community.

Figure 1 is primarily an educational platform, so we welcome content that teaches your fellow members. Share de-identified patient stories without images, discuss a new medical technology being used in your institution, ask about procedures and protocols, propose topics for discussions, ask relevant questions, or share any other topic that you learned and think our community will benefit from. As always, we do not allow asking questions that can be easily researched or homework assignments, attacking certain professions or colleagues, screenshots from other platforms or forums, or personal questions.

We’ve crafted these Guidelines to ensure that everyone in the Figure 1 community can engage in meaningful educational sharing. If you don’t feel that you can abide by our Community Guidelines as outlined above, Figure 1 might not be right for you.

If you see something that you think may violate any of our Guidelines, please help us by using our built-in reporting function in the app. We have a global team that reviews these reports and works to remove any content that violates our Guidelines.

If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear from you. Please feel free to email us at support@figure1.com.

The Figure 1 Team

Updated November 23, 2022