Orthopedic surgeon Joel Wallskog. MD, today became the first physician in Wisconsin to Twitter during surgery.
Twitter is the latest social networking phenomenon. Twittering involves sending messages — called Tweets — of 140 characters or less across Web-based applications. It’s a free, subscriber-based service.
"I’m always interested in new ways to perform procedures and communicate with patients," says Dr. Wallskog, who operates at Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center in Milwaukee. By blogging via Twitter while performing a bilateral knee replacement, he achieved both goals.
The surgery involved customized knee implants, which reportedly reduce case times, limit blood loss and result in less scarring and post-op pain for patients. During the procedure, Aurora spokesman Peter Balistrieri manned a laptop in the OR to send Twitter users a running commentary of the surgery. He also relayed answers to questions submitted to Dr. Wallskog, and sent links to updated photos of the surgical action.
While Aurora isn’t the first facility to Twitter during surgery — earlier this month, Sherman Hospital in Elgin, Ill., sent updates of a hysterectomy performed using the da Vinci surgical system — they continued what might soon become a trend in health care. "Twittering breaks down the walls of surgery," says Mr. Balistrieri. "It provides a forum for patients, surgeons and healthcare professionals to learn about a wide variety of procedures."
UPDATE: Due to a string of posts that apparently proved "too fast and too furious" for the short-format social networking site, Twitter locked out Aurora with still an hour of surgery left to go this morning, says Jamey Shiels, director of social media and digital communication for Aurora Health Care. More than 2,000 users were following the commentary and photos posted in real-time by surgical staff before the site locked them out.
—Daniel Cook
