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The Implications for Live Tweeting Surgery

By Bob Coffield

Yesterday Robert Hendrick, health care disruptor (I mean that in a positive way) and co-founder of change:healthcare, live tweeted his laser ablation surgery at the Surgical Clinic in Nashville. He also tweeted the first installment of his surgery to remove his varicose veins -- Live from the Operating Room.

Robert and his counterpart, Christopher Parks, are all about transparency in health care, especially as it relates to payment issues. This serves as just one more example of their efforts to engage health consumers and create transparency in health care.

Robert's live tweeting during surgery struck me as an interesting application of Twitter and other mobile social networking application. Here are just a few thoughts:

• A way to keep friends and family updated on your condition, surgery, etc.
• Useful for others who might be contemplating a particular procedure or surgery to get a real time look at what might be involved. I know someone who is contemplating undergoing the same procedure and plan to share Robert's posts with them.
• As more and more patients and providers start to document information via social networking avenues - what might this mean during future litigation and discovery? Certainly seeking tweets, historical Facebook updates, etc. might be valuable in either pursuing or defending litigation. What are the rules for lawyers in pursuing such evidence? What might this mean for the companies providing such services as they see more and more subpoenas for information?
  

For a real time look at surgery tweets check out Twitter Search for the term -- surgery. Interesting stuff. I welcome others thoughts on the topic.

Thanks Robert for making my day for awarding me "best tweet of the procedure." Follow Robert on Twitter at @Robert_Hendrick.

Full post as published by Health Care Law Blog on November 13, 2008 (boomark / email).