The last few weeks have silently ushered in a new era of the Internet infiltrating the normally private sanctity of the operating room. The non-profit Aurora Health Care made technology history by broadcasting a bi-lateral knee replacement surgery live via the interactive social network  Twitter.

 

Several surgeons have already publicly broadcast surgery on YouTube allowing patients to watch the procedure after the fact. For example, Dr. K. RameshNaidu published a video of a lap hysterectomy to youtube.com in 2007.  However, the non-profit Aurora Health Care has evolved beyond posting static surgery video after the fact into making surgery a live public interactive event.

 

On April 16th, 2009, orthopedic surgeon Dr. Joel Wallskog at Aurora Health Care in Milwaukee conducted a bi-lateral knee replacement broadcast live via Twitter. Twitter is considered a “micro-blogging” social network where members can post “tweets”, text-only posts of 140 characters or less. Use of the Twitter service allowed public viewers to read live information about the surgery and post questions to the operating room staff as the procedure was being performed.

 

Aurora Health Care made full use of the live interactive nature of Twitter to describe each of the surgical steps performed and to describe some of the materials employed. At one point, Aurora posted, “now the knee is opened up and arthritis is very evident...he's taking out remaining meniscus and then he will cut the ACL.” A short while later a Twitter message included information about installation of the femur side elements and included a picture of the process.

 

The use of real-time interactive social networking during a surgery is definitely a new frontier in the evolution of the Internet.  While many people may have visceral positive or negative feelings about this technological step, the use of social networking can unravel some of the secrets of the operating room to provide a very valuable public educational tool.