If you still think Twitter’s all about what-I’m-having-for-breakfast, you probably weren’t following the @StLukesCR Twitter feed this morning and early afternoon:
That was the fourth 0f 126 tweets in a live twittercast of a robotic surgery at St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids Monday by Sarah Corizzo, media relations specialist/writer for St. Luke’s, author of the @StLukesCR Twitter feed.
As reported last week, St. Luke’s believes it is the first Iowa hospital to twittercast surgery. It was a fascinating piece of narrative journalism, unfolding in real time as Drs. Jerry Rozeboom & Owen McCarron from OB/GYN Associates P.C. and a da Vinci surgical robot operated on the unidentified patient.
The account shows the value of Twitter for telling stories as they happen. And it shows that the tool can be used by organizations throughout the community to tell their own stories, as well as by journalists.
Twitpic photographs showed Rozeboom operating the robot, the da Vinci robot (below), tissue being stitched, a mesh used in the surgery and the uterus before its removal (another promised photo of Rozeboom and McCarron turned out to be a busted link).
Corizzo’s tweets give information about the type of surgery, answer questions from followers on Twitter and provide a straight-forward account that was simple but dramatic in its understatement:
Right now doctor is cutting across some vessels & ligaments that connect the ovaries to the uterus.
We are cutting the neck of the cervix right now. This is done so doctors can put a graph or a mesh around it to hold the vagina in place.
Dr. Rozeboom has removed the uterus now and will place it near the belly & remove it later.
Having a good assistant surgeon like Dr. McCarron is very important. He is helping move the bowel out of the way to put the mesh in place.
Surgical nurses are getting equipment for removing the uterus ready. The tool twists the uterus and cuts it in tiny pieces.
I emailed Corizzo, asking her about the twittercast and the response. She answered:
We had 37 retweets and questions during today’s three-hour procedure. We also had about ten direct messages. Mostly positive feedback. People thought it was really interesting, enjoyed seeing the photos and being able to ask questions in real time. From our end I think it went pretty well — aside from my typos. I would say my biggest challenge was getting some of the medical lingo into terms an everyday person could understand. Thankfully, I was able to ask the doctors for clarification a couple of times, which was nice and very helpful.
Yes, this is the first time we have done this and to our knowledge this is the first time a hospital in Iowa has Twitter-casted. We know the Internet is one of the main avenues patients go to when they are having a surgery or treating an illness. We wanted to use this surgery Twitter-cast as a way to provide people with information that was educational and pertinent. We started planning this a couple of months ago. We heard a few hospitals had done it and I contacted the social media specialist at one of the hospitals that had tweeted a live surgery and talked to him about what he wished he would have done…I used some of his suggestions and found this conversation to be very helpful.
You asked about privacy. We contacted the patient ahead of time to see if she was willing to participate. She was agreeable and her family watched the Twitter-cast from our Surgicare waiting area. They told me they really enjoyed it and it made the surgery go fast. They were following along and looking at the pictures too.
As to doing it again in the future…we may. We are always looking for ways to connect with patients and consumers and social media is another way for us to reach a new group of individuals.
A suggestion for St. Luke’s and others trying this technique: Feed the Twitter feeds into a CoverItLive liveblog, so distant loved ones catching up from time to time and the patient reading the replay later can read the tweets in chronological order, rather than bottom-up in the Twitter stream.
Not just as a journalist and media innovator, but as a surgery patient and family member of surgery patients (a niece had a successful C-section Monday, too, and a nephew had a bone-marrow transplant this spring), I think Twittercasting surgery should become common, if not routine. It keeps family and friends informed and engaged throughout the process, rather than the usual hours-long information blackout. I think other businesses should consider such Twitter accounts of events that are important and interesting. This is a fabulous tool to use to tell life’s stories.
This surgery went well, but what if it hadn’t? What will surgeons do about Tweeting the little things — let alone the big things — that frequently go wrong during surgery? Will they be open and honest if unexpected bleeding develops, or the patient stops breathing, or blood pressure drops or, God forbid, the patient dies on the table? Is Twitter the best and most ethical way to notify next of kin? I hope they’re thinking this through.
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Excellent point and question, Jim. I will point it out to Sarah and encourage her to respond. My take would be that you don’t tweet anything that’s not true, but you don’t tweet bad developments. If you’re twittercasting and something goes wrong — as happens — you stop twittering and someone informs the waiting family pretty quickly in person what’s going on and what’s being done. I also would suggest that this isn’t appropriate for every surgery.
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Twitter is not appropriate for every procedure or every patient. This surgery and patient was hand selected by the surgeon.
The safety of the patient is St. Luke’s number one priority. If something had gone wrong we would have taken a break from tweeting. Obviously the most important thing would have been taking care of the patient.
The family would be notified by the surgeon of what was happening to their loved one and not via Twitter. Updates would have been posted at a later time after all of the stakeholders were notified.
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[…] on services such as Twitter and Facebook. Early this week, for example, a robotic surgery was broadcast on Twitter in a series of 126 short updates (from bottom to […]
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[…] Riveting Twitter narrative of robotic surgery […]
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[…] https://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/riveting-twitter-narrative-of-robotic-surgery-at-st-luke… (3-hour event) […]
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