Advanced medical technology figures into the more than 36,000 surgeries Rex Healthcare performs annually. But a recent November surgery was the first to feature a smartphone. Two of them, to be exact. And both were actively engaged in every surgical step from patient preparation to the closing of four small incisions.
The procedure was a hysterectomy and the phones weren’t part of the actual surgery. The phones were logged on to Twitter as for the first time the Raleigh, North Carolina hospital tweeted a surgery in real time.
“We saw it as a way to use a leading edge social media tool to showcase the leading edge medical procedures we have here,” said Jason Papagan, eMarketing manager for Rex Healthcare.
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Hospitals across the country are exploring new ways of engaging patients and doctors. More than 1,200 U.S. hospitals engage use social networking tools, according to one estimate. The vast majority of those hospitals have Facebook pages though Twitter ranks as the second most popular social networking tool.
IT services company Computer Sciences Corp. (NYSE:CSC) said in a recent report on healthcare social media that it’s important for all organizations to have a social media policy. That’s because even if a healthcare organization doesn’t have an active social media presence, its employees and patients do. According to a recent Nielsen report, people spend about 23 percent of their time online using social media sites, nearly three times as much time as they spend on e-mail.
Some hospitals have turned to tweeting surgeries as part of their outreach. Last summer, Ohio State Medical Center tweeted a knee procedure, staking its claim as the first Ohio hospital to tweet a surgery. OSU officials said that tweeting served the dual purposes of publicizing the availability of a particular knee procedure while also serving as an educational aid informing medical students interested in orthopedics. Rex decided to turn to Twitter to mark the 2,000th surgery performed using the da Vinci robotic surgery system.
The Rex surgeons performing the procedure agreed to participate and the patient gave full, written consent. None of the doctors participating in the surgery did any of the actual tweeting. Papagan was joined by another member of the hospital’s marketing team to tag team the tweets. The smartphones were also helpful for snapping and posting photos throughout the half hour surgery. Papagan said it was key to have two people tweeting because the surgery moves quickly. But he added that the natural back and forth interaction between doctors created logical points to mark with Twitter posts.
“In any surgery, there’s a lot of talking going on so there’s things to narrate what they’re doing,” Papagan said.
Rex plans to tweet more surgeries to reach both doctors and patients. Most Rex surgeries are already shot with video that is streamed to a conference room for viewing by other doctors. Those doctors may consult or just observe. Papagan said that surgical tweeting could bring these observations to a broader audience.
“Any physician can follow from anywhere,” he said.
