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On Wednesday, doctors at Jewish Hospital & St. Mary's HealthCare in Louisville, Ky., completed the state's first double hand transplant following 17½ hours of complicated surgery. Even more unusual than the operation itself, however, was the fact that the hospital provided a play-by-play stream of live commentary via its Twitter account.
"We live in a real-time world today where people want to know what's happening as it is happening," Marty Bonick, president and CEO of Jewish Hospital Medical Campus, said in a press release. "This is a chance for us to tell the world about our latest hand transplant as it happens and also take the mystery out of an innovative procedure."
Whether or not a large segment of the population has an appetite to follow real-time surgical procedures, the lead surgeon in the hand transplant noted one audience that did.
"The patient's family is very excited about being able to follow the surgery online instead of occasional updates throughout the surgery by hospital personnel," Dr. Warren C. Breidenbach said in a press release. "We want others to follow the surgery as to understand how it all works, identifying and connecting bones, arteries and veins."
So what did the the the surgery feel like on Twitter?
Just wheeled the patient into the OR....things are getting close now to starting... #handtx
jewishhospital
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About four hours and a dozen tweets later, readers continued to monitor the process.
Continuing donor and recipient dissection tendon identification and nerve identification in both recipient hands. Going smoothly. #handtxjewishhospital
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Along the way, the hospital also assured readers that the tweets were not being written by any of the six surgeons performing the operations.
@rpeinert Updates provided by Christiana Savvidou, M.D., Senior Hand Fellow with Kleinert Kutz. She is not participating in surgery. #handtxjewishhospital
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Perhaps much to the relief of everyone involved, the final message of the live feed proved a happy one.
The patient is now in recovery. Our first double hand transplant is complete! Signing off for the day. Thx for following along. #handtxjewishhospital
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But the digital communication didn't end there. Not long after the operation was finished, the hospital also posted pictures of the procedure -- which turns out to be only the third double hand transplant on U.S. soil in history -- on their website.
Believe it or not, Jewish Hospital & St. Mary's HealthCare is not the first to live tweet a surgical procedure. Among the facilities to use the microblogging site is Detroit's Henry Ford Hospital, which employed Twitter to help detail the removal of a cancerous tumor in 2009, and Seattle's Swedish Medical Center, which documented a kidney procedure in 2010.
