Signature Hospital learns to operate social media
A glowing monitor provided a live look of the 53-year-old patient’s beating heart. As it did, a nurse focused on the image as the surgeon beside her carefully maneuvered a catheter into a vein in the person’s wrist. He guided it through her arm and to her heart.
In an adjacent control room, several other members of the team watched – nurses, doctors and hospital staff glared through the window, monitoring screens, vital signs and overseeing the procedure.
But one woman, not dressed in the typical hospital garb, didn’t look ahead – instead, she stared down at her laptop and mobile device, clicking away. Her expertise isn’t medicine, but social media. On this day, her job was to show the public, live, how this life-saving procedure is done at Signature Healthcare Brockton Hospital.
In a first for the hospital, she would do this through the instant-messaging site Twitter, which allows her to send short messages – complete with pictures and video – throughout the operation to the public.
“At this time the arm is repositioned in preparation for the insertion of the catheter,” she typed near the start. “All work is done through the small tube.”
It would be one of three dozen messages, photos and videos she would send during the transradial cardiac catheterization procedure, which was being performed to unclog an artery in the patient’s heart.
As social media becomes part of our everyday lives, hospitals such as Signature are finding new and innovative ways to connect and communicate with prospective patients, such as Twitter and the social-media site Facebook. The online tools provide limitless potential to not just help patients, but to share with others – including students – how procedures are done.
For Dr. Syed Tahir, who performed the procedure, live-tweeting was a way to bring people into the operating room with him, giving them access that would otherwise be impossible.
“We just wanted to reach out to our patient population just to show them what we do in the cath (catheterization) lab,” said Tahir.
From a medical perspective, Tahir said, live-tweeting surgeries such as the stent procedure can be a good way to dispel some of the fears people may have when it comes to surgeries.
“When people come here they are very anxious and nervous about the procedure,” Tahir said. “No one can think of people getting to your heart from such a small hole, so if there are some prospective patients or family members of people watching, they would know that it’s not as complex a procedure as they would think.”
Signature, for its first time tweeting a procedure, chose the minimally invasive surgery where a stent would be inserted into a clogged artery to allow for better blood flow.
Even though the operation started around 9 a.m., the tweeting three hours earlier.
At 6:10 a.m., the first tweet of the day said: “Follow along this morning as we lead up to our LIVE Twittercast of a #transradial cardiac procedure - 9am ET #heart #cardiology.”
Later, at 9:12 a.m., they tweeted:
“Our patient Jen, now in the procedure room, has signed a HIPAA release permitting us to share details of this event on Twitter.”
When the procedure began, tweets became more descriptive, and included photos and videos, some of which had been previously prepared.
“A nurse administers medication through a vein for sedation to relax the patient. She will be awake for the procedure,” one tweet read.
During the procedure, a catheter or tube is inserted into a vein in the wrist and guided up to the troubled artery of the heart. Once in place, the surgeon guides a small metal wire up the catheter to the clogged artery. At the end of the wire is a stent, or metal mesh cylinder that can be expanded by a tiny balloon to the size of the inside wall of the artery.
Once the stent is in place, the metal wire is taken out and the catheter, removed. The procedure took about 30 minutes.
Tahir performed the operation on a woman who had an 80-percent blockage in one of her arteries. The patient, whom hospital staff were not allowed to identify due to privacy laws, is a smoker who is diabetic and went to the hospital complaining of chest pains three months ago. She was diagnosed with coronary artery disease, where a person’s arteries are blocked with plaque.
The reason they chose the particular surgery to live-tweet, Tahir said, was because it is typically done by inserting a catheter into the femoral artery in the patient’s groin. This procedure was done through the wrist, which Tahir said is less invasive, allows for less recovery time and has a smaller possibility of blood loss.
The live-tweeting of the surgery was something Ed Cabellon, a social media expert and assistant to the vice president at Bridgewater State University, found intriguing and full of potential.
“It’s a great, innovative way to connect people around medicine,” Cabellon said. “If I wanted to know what went on in an operating room around some surgery I’d have to either experience it myself or have a family member go through it. Now, if I’m a prospective med student or someone that’s going into the field, I’m getting a glance or hospital perspective on how and why they do the things they do.”
Signature Hospital has since packaged the tweets together and made the entire presentation available online as well.
“You could imagine a lot of biology programs around here, if they knew that these events were being tweeted, then you could simultaneously have students currently in programs who would be doing similar surgeries ask questions,” Cabellon said. “Maybe you could do a live-chat after the surgery is over and have people ask the doctor questions directly.”
Dan Dunlop, president of the healthcare-marketing firm Jennings, worked with Signature staff for weeks to prepare for the live event.
“As a team we thought that using Twitter for some kind of a Twittercast or chat would be really interesting,” Dunlop said. “We’re using leading edge communication to talk about leading edge medical procedures. It helped shed some light on heart disease and really effective treatments and that’s a wonderful thing.”
After they found a patient willing to participate, the marketing team spread the word about the live-tweet event on Twitter and Facebook.
They worked with Dr. Jean-Pierre Geagea, chief of cardiology at the hospital, to prepare a script of tweets that described the procedure step-by-step that could be copied and pasted and sent out as they went along. They also viewed the procedure themselves in-person and watched YouTube videos of the operation being done to get a thorough understanding of what they would be tweeting about.
Before, during and after the surgery, the hospital sent out out descriptions of what was taking place, including photos, but also included previously recorded YouTube videos of doctors discussing the procedure.
Although much of the program was scripted, one unanticipated moment occurred when Tahir put the stent in place. The edge of the metal stent pushed too hard against the artery, causing a small tear. When tears occur, they are repaired by placing a second stent over it.
In the control room, Dr. Geagea quickly drew a diagram to show what occurred, after which the marketing team created new tweets to describe what had happened. One read:
“Both stents are in place & the wire has been carefully pulled out.”
The live “Twittercast” reached about 145,000 potential Twitter accounts, which was the number of Twitter users who participated either directly or indirectly, Dunlop said.
Also, the presentation will live on indefinitely online. All the tweets, photos and videos from the day have been put together using the web service Storify, meaning patients, doctors and the public can watch the procedure again, from start to finish, at the click of a button.
Signature Healthcare Brockton Hospital
Twitter: @SignatureHlth. Facebook.com/MySignatureCare
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Twitter: @southshorehosp. Facebook.com/southshorehospital
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Twitter: @Steward.
Facebook.com/pages/Good-Samaritan-Medical-Center
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Twitter: @SouthcoastHlth.
No Facebook page.
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Twitter: @Steward.