by Tony Chen

Since we've blogged extensively in the past about hospitals and social media, here's a quick note: Henry Ford Hospital will be sharing a live kidney cancer surgery on Twitter on Monday.

From their PR team:

Dr. Craig Rogers will lead a surgical team from Henry Ford Hospital as they perform a robotic partial nephrectomy. The public will be able to receive updates and information from OR 25 at Henry Ford Hospital, and communicate with the surgeons via the Twitter microblogging service. Henry Ford is a teaching hospital.

Also, check out Ed Bennett's tally list of Hospitals using social networking tools. Can you believe that there's 60 hospitals on twitter already? Yes, that's only about 1 percent of the all the hospitals in the country.

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For most of us, it may never make sense to utilize these communications tools. Nonetheless, we can learn something from those that do. The tool gets all of the glizz and glamour. And yes, some of the tools will turn out to be fads. Nonetheless, what never fails to impress and connect people is a sincere willingness to listen to others and to be transparent. If there isn't a real willingness for back-and-forth, using the coolest tool in the world will just be for show.

I applaud Henry Ford for trailblazing in this manner. Too bad I won't be able to join as my corporate firewall blocks twitter (though I'm working on that...).

UPDATE: CNN just reported on this event as well.