On Jan. 12, 2009, the highly rated Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit was the first to give a live play-by-play of a surgery via Twitter.

The event involved an anonymous male patient undergoing a robotic procedure to remove his cancerous bladder and was tweeted by a surgeon who provided running commentary and updates from a sterile field outside the operating room.

"So far, we've done five live operations on Twitter," says Maria Seyrig, a spokeswoman with Henry Ford Health System. "We did this as an effort to connect with people who are looking to social media for health care information."

Soon after the initial surgery, other hospitals began to follow suit, including highly rated Sherman Hospital in Elgin, Ill., Children's Medical Center in Dallas and Aurora Health Care in Milwaukee.

St. Luke's Hospital in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, tweeted a robotic hysterectomy in the fall of 2009. Laura Rainey, the director of marketing and communications, says the highly rated hospital received a positive response from the patient's family and the majority of the public.

"We did have some who said, 'What happens in the operation room should stay in the operation room,'" she says. "But the family involved was extremely grateful. It gave them a glimpse of what happens in an operation room and helped relieve some of the anxiety."