Fox News broadcasted today a brief report on a surgical chief resident using Twitter during an operation. The “delicate operation removing a cancerous tumor from a kidney” occurred at a hospital in Detroit (Michigan). No additional details were provided. This leaves us with a few interesting questions:
- Were these personal or professional tweets?
- What type of information was transmitted?
- What had the surgical team hoped to achieve?
- Was the patient aware that this activity had occurred?
- What about the attending physician supervising/performing the operation?
The reporter had discussed this incident with a Fox News medical contributor, Dr. Jennifer Ashen, who is also a surgeon. She first clarified that it was probably not the chief resident–but an intern or other resident–who would be tweeting. The chief resident would probably have been assisting with the operation. She then stated that there were advantages and disadvantages of using Twitter in this case. When asked by the reporter to state an advantage, Dr. Ashen was unfortunately unclear or unable to provide a convincing response.
I believe there may be interesting and potentially useful applications for real-time microblogging in future surgical cases, but so far there have been no compelling uses in this arena. But just as Dr. Ashen had mentioned, we would first have to hash out the privacy and medico-legal issues.
