http://www.sbnation.com/lookit/2013/10/24/5024682/video-hospital-live-tweets-acl-surgery
In October of 2013, Memorial Hermann Hospital continued to remain at the front of the lines of technology, not by using some sort of new tool or technique, but by live tweeting the knee surgery of an unnamed teen female athlete who injured her ACL playing intramural football. The livetweet session was fairly vague as to her identity, but that girl was actually a Rice student, injured in a powderpuff game!
Using every social media outlet that they could, the doctors on the case showed off their work — across Twitter using #MHknee with both descriptions and photos, and on Vine and YouTube as well. Now there is, at the link at the top, a 6 second video summary of a standard ACL surgery done by the head physician for the Houston Rockets and the Houston Texans. (Warning- it’s fairly graphic!)
This is not the first time that Memorial Hermann has graced the internet with graphic representations of surgery over social media. In May of 2012, surgeons there documented a 21 year old female’s brain surgery, telling twitter all about the angioma in her right temporal lobe, including showing MRIs of her brain, and describing it’s removal. Concurrent posts to YouTube documented her journey of the day, including explanations of the procedures and tools used, and even video of the drilling into and removing a portion of the skull. Photos even went up on the site more known for wedding dresses and craft instructions, Pinterest.
Memorial Hermann was the first hospital to attempt such a presentation of the real time sequence of events with a live tweeting (text only, in that case) of open heart surgery a few months before the brain surgery, and they continue to lead the way in keeping the public in the know about such drastic surgeries.
Other medical institutions have followed the way, and just 6 days ago surgeons at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre livetweet a bypass, becoming the first in Canada to do so.
“This is an engaging way of keeping the public informed,” surgeon Dr. Gideon Cohen was quoted as saying in a post surgery interview with CBC News. But the same article quoted the blog of Summer McGee, “a professor of public health ethics and policy at the University of New Haven in West Haven,” Connecticut. McGee poses the question of what might occur if a live tweeted surgery like this might come to an unfortunate end– and what ethical issues might come to light in such an event.
In the era of social media, it is certainly something to think about. While more and more people might have access to and be interested in an event like this, and it can be a great PR boost for a hospital amidst a dozen other hospitals like Hermann, it certainly has the potential to go wrong. McGee recommends that “Limiting the PR elements and focusing on the educational elements of this practice is likely to help ensure the practice doesn’t get out of hand and harm patients or their relationships with physicians and health systems.” While livetweeting may be fascinating for the audience, the patients must always come first.